


Forces Beyond Our Control

by thetamehistorian



Series: All Things In Balance [3]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Aphasia, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language, Fluff, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Training, Force-Sensitive Din Djarin, Found Family, Gen, Good Parent Din Djarin, Hurt/Comfort, Inappropriate Use of Lightsabers, The Mandalorian becomes a Force user and yet is still somehow oblivious, The Mandalorian is force sensitive and utterly oblivious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-22 14:43:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 39,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22284481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetamehistorian/pseuds/thetamehistorian
Summary: Another planet, another dead end.Beside him, the child let out a quiet, concerned noise, his small claws clutching at his sleeve. He brushed a finger over an ear in the hopes of soothing him.“I’m alright,ad’ika,” he said softly. A blatant lie. “We’ll get out of this.” A promise.Din searches for the child's kind.
Series: All Things In Balance [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1604062
Comments: 367
Kudos: 1000





	1. I. The Betrayal

**Author's Note:**

> Again, the folks over on CoffeeQuill's discord are entirely to blame for this.  
> Mando as a force sensitive but oblivious to it dumbass is my new headcannon and I will go down with this ship.  
> As always, Mando'a translations are found on hover and in the end notes for each chapter.
> 
> I post occassionally on [Tumblr](https://thetamehistorian.tumblr.com/)  
> Catch me hanging out on CoffeeQuill's Discord

Another planet, another dead end, another absolute shit show.

Din chanced a quick glance over the counter and nearly got a blaster bolt to the eye for his trouble. Even if his beskar was capable of deflecting blaster bolts at this range, he was less confident in the visor and these guys weren’t the worst shots he had encountered.

He was also running out of ammunition much faster than he would like.

There was the sound of scuffling feet and he raised his blaster in one hand, curling the other around the child, ensuring that the little one was tucked out of sight and protected by the bulk of his body. One of the bandits broke cover, a bad move, and he pulled the trigger, watching as the body fell to the floor with a thump to join the countless others, a neat hole in its head.

How many more were there? He sucked in a breath and abruptly let it out as a stifled groan when the move pulled on the ragged slice in his side. Skill might have given him the edge early on in the fight, but the bandits had the numbers and eventually, before they’d got him on the defensive, one of them had got lucky with a swipe that found a gap between beskar and armour weave.

Beside him, the child let out a quiet, concerned noise, his small claws clutching at his sleeve. He brushed a finger over an ear in the hopes of soothing him.

“I’m alright, _ad’ika_ ,” he said softly. A blatant lie. “We’ll get out of this.” A promise.

Another bandit risked his luck and Din reacted with reflexes honed by years of sparring and firefights. The bandit, whatever species it was because it wasn’t one Din recognized, fell with a less than neat hole in its chest which wasn’t great because that’s not what he’d been aiming for. Din released a shaky breath, doing his best to steady the subtle trembling in his fingers, caused by the blood loss, most likely. There was certainly more than he was comfortable with pooling on the floor, but he couldn’t afford to compromise on accuracy now.

“Give it up Mandalorian,” one of the bandits called from behind the counter. “You can’t win this fight.”

He hated to admit it, but he was beginning to think that they were right. His vision was starting to play up a little and he could feel his arms getting weaker. They wouldn’t even need to keep shooting at this rate, all they’d have to do was wait him out.

His side burned with every breath.

When a contact at a cantina in a bar on Batuu had offered him information on the possible location of another one of the child’s species he’d been cautious, but hopeful. He’d been putting feelers out for a while, to no avail, and he’d been starting to wonder if the child was the last of its kind because it was strange that there were so few records of a species as distinctive as his. Then, just as he was considering heading back to Navarro to rest and restock, he’d received a message with the offer; information on the child, in exchange for retrieving an artifact stolen by Imperial soldiers and stashed in an ex-Imperial stronghold on the planet Christophsis in the Outer Rim.

It had seemed too good to be true. For a Mandalorian, the kind of Outer Rim trouble that he had been expecting to encounter should have been easy to deal with, and his contact had never let him down before.

Well, he mused as another blaster bolt flew over his head, never too late to commit that first betrayal.

The bandits wouldn’t have been a problem under normal circumstances. These weren’t normal circumstances. He hadn’t needed to listen for long to learn that they had not only been pre-warned of his arrival but also offered the incentive of a hefty reward for his head and the child safely delivered back to Batuu. At this point he didn’t even know if the promised intel was real or, if it was, what other uses his contact had for that sort of information and what it would mean for his adopted son.

Either way, he didn’t like it.

Din tried to shift to a better position and had to bite back a groan as the pain flared. It was getting worse, moving was going to be an issue unless he had no other choice. Though, if it came to it, he’d shield the child and run until either they were safe or he dropped. He’d protect the child with his life if need be. That was the Way.

He tucked the child in closer and checked his blaster. Only enough charge left for a few more shots, and then he’d be relying on his vibroblade. Realistically, he was already out of options.

“I’m sorry little one,” he said, letting his head drop back against the counter to gather what remained of his strength. The child cooed, its ears drooping. He wondered how much it truly understood.

The back entrance was a few metres away. He could make it.

Then, just as he was bracing himself to scoop up the child and break cover, he felt something, something new, something he didn’t recognize. It set all the hairs on the back of his neck on end.

There was a sound not dissimilar to a blaster firing and then a low, continuous humming. He could sense the bandits turning their attention towards whatever the source of that sound was and he pulled the child tight to him instinctually, his own disquiet at the change in atmosphere making him tense further even though it aggravated his side.

He heard the leader of bandits shoot, the hum changed in pitch as it moved and for the next minute he sat in the midst of utter confusion.

The bandits were shouting in different languages. He heard screams that were abruptly cut off, blaster bolts firing, no longer at him, but instead towards the doorway. Underneath it all, the modulating humming continued.

This could be his chance, if only he could summon up the will to move.

But whatever the new threat was, it was terrifying enough that the bandits, so easily motivated by reward, had completely forgotten about him and the child. They were running, hiding, trying to escape, and abandoning all sense of discipline. One ran right past the end of the counter he was slumped behind, sprinting for the back entrance and whatever safety it might offer.

Din put a blaster bolt in his back before he could reach it.

After a few more seconds of tense waiting the sounds began to quiet, then stopped and all Din could hear was his own ragged breathing and the humming. Whatever chance he might have had at getting out, he’d missed his window of opportunity now. He’d have to face the opponent that had sent two dozen bandits running in terror and, if the noise still coming from behind him was any indication, come out on top.

He readjusted his grip on the blaster as the footsteps moved around the room, checking for survivors maybe, then headed unerringly towards their hiding spot.

When the owner of those footsteps came into view, he raised the blaster, ready to pull the trigger, to do whatever he physically could to save the child. His hand was visibly shaking now, and he wasn’t sure which of the two blurry figures he was seeing was real. The humming weapon cast an eerie green glow over his wavering vision. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before.

He was paralyzed. Not by fear, as he might have expected, but by something indescribable. The strangest sense of calm descended over him, almost as though the stranger was emitting it as an aura. He’d felt something similar once or twice before, always in fights, always when things were becoming desperate, and he’d always come out of them alive. That didn’t mean he would this time.

For a moment, Din wondered if he was looking death in the face, if the calm was merely signaling that his time had come.

Then, with another strange sound and a twist of the handle, the humming weapon snapped away, taking the green glow with it. He blinked, surprised, and briefly the two figures merged into one so that he could see the face of the person who would either be his executioner, or his rescuer.

It was a woman, human or near enough to pass as human, plainly dressed and frowning. He recognized a warrior when he saw one. She had seen things no one should see, evidenced in the few lines on her face and the flickering in her eyes as they stared each other down.

From beneath his arm, the child shifted, ears lifting in curiosity. He tried to push the child back, to hide him, but his grip was too weak and it was too late. Her eyes had snapped to the movement and her frown deepened.

When he failed to shoot, the woman slowly crouched down careful to keep her distance, her hands held out away from her strange weapon.

“My apologies,” she said. In Basic, thankfully, though he couldn’t place the accent. She hadn’t even flinched in the face of his blaster. “I did not mean to frighten the child.”

Knowing that his helmet obscured his gaze, he let his eyes drop quickly down to glance at the child’s head where it was now poking out from behind his arm. All things considered, the child seemed pretty calm, those wide eyes watching the newcomer. Din had learned over the past few months to trust the child’s instincts and it was pretty clear that the kid didn’t consider the woman a threat.

She didn’t feel like a threat to him either. That unnatural calm was still there, lingering on the edge of his perception, calm and warmth. He’d need more than a strange feeling before he let his guard down though.

“I mean you no harm,” she continued when he failed to respond. “Although, I must admit, I wasn’t expecting to find a Mandalorian here.”

Slowly, cautiously, he lowered the blaster, resting it in his lap so that he could act quickly if he needed to.

“What did you expect to find?” he rasped, hoping to at least work out her motivations.

“I’m not sure,” she said, eyes drifting back over to the child. He felt himself tense in response, the urge to protect overriding his own discomfort and pain. “I only knew that I was needed.”

It was a bizarre thing to say, and didn’t really make much sense. Before he could ask anything more, to get some clarification, he heard another familiar sound – that of a knife being removed from its sheath.

Suddenly, there was movement behind the stranger. He went to raise the blaster again, not that he had any confidence left in his aim, and stopped just as abruptly because she had moved, almost preternaturally fast. The glowing blade ignited with a hum, stopping to rest barely an inch away from the bandit’s throat.

“I wouldn’t,” she warned the bandit simply, “if I were you.”

“Jedi scum,” the bandit spat out in response.

In his head, Din felt the pieces click into place. He had only heard about them in the stories the Mandarlorian’s had told, these _jetii_ , and the stories had not been kind. Beyond that he had only the limited information that the Armourer had provided him with. If it was true, if he’d accidently stumbled across a _jetii_ , it might explain why the child wasn’t kicking up a storm. Perhaps it could sense others like itself.

Maybe the woman could too. Was that why she had suddenly become so interested in his son? Was there some mystical reasoning behind her sudden appearance?

Then the woman went and threw all of his assumptions out of the window.

“A saber does not a Jedi make,” she said and he could hear the undertone of anger in her voice, “and I am no Jedi.”

The bandit drew breath, presumably to try insulting her again. He didn’t get the chance, the glowing blade cut straight through him like butter. There was no blood, whatever the weapon was made from; it was clearly capable of cauterizing wounds as quickly as it made them.

Din could only watch in a mixture of awe, shock, and surprise, with mouth slightly ajar, as the severed head hit the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mando'a translations:  
> ad’ika – little one / son / daughter  
> jetii - Mando'a for Jedi


	2. I. The Healer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Din gets a lead, makes a new friend, and experiences the less-pleasant aspects of field medicine. Not necessarily in that order.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the lovely comments on the last chapter!  
> This chapter contains descriptions of injury, blood, and the aforementioned field medicine.

The severed head rolled to neat stop beside his boot and, for a moment, there was calm.

Then the child, who had been startled into silence, made a small noise.

She, the not- _jetii_ turned back to face them, the humming blade whirring and he flinched back like he hadn’t since he was a boy. The movement sent a fresh flash of agony sparking up his side, reminding him quite firmly that he had a serious problem, and this time he couldn’t hold back a quiet cry.

There had been something cloying and heavy in the atmosphere and he only really noticed it in its sudden absence. The woman hesitated and lowered the weapon. With a snap, the weapon shut off and she crouched again, slowly, cautiously.

“You’re hurt,” she said, brows furrowing.

“Yeah, no shit,” he gasped out in reply. He’d pressed a hand to the injury and when he drew it away the glove was stained red. And shaking.

She approached with small movements, until she was kneeling a few feet away, the weapon laid aside. She raised a hand towards him carefully, as though he were a wounded and spooked animal. It was not a comparison he appreciated.

“I can help you, if you’ll let me.”

“And why should I?” His voice was weaker than he had hoped, but his tone conveyed his meaning well enough. Whatever it was he’d just sensed around her, he hadn’t liked it one bit.

She sighed, let her head drop.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” she said. “Normally, I try to resolve things peacefully. There wasn’t time. The Force demanded I reach you.”

Din sucked in a sharp breath at the mention of the Force, ignoring the pain that came with it. He’d heard the rumours of course, and seen his son in action. He knew, in an academic sense, that it was real.

“But you claim that you’re not a Jedi.”

“No,” she confirmed, still holding a hand out, palm turning up, offering, “I’m not. I follow the Force, not the Jedi code. Please, let me help you, for the sake of the little one if nothing else.”

As though he knew he was being mentioned the child made a quiet concerned noise and poked its head back out from behind him. Din restrained the urge to push him back with difficulty.

“Why would the Force want you to help us?”

She smiled a sad smile. “I suspect, because your little one was asking it to,” she said after a moment.

“What do you mean?”

She dropped her hand down to her lap, laced her fingers together.

“I can sense him in the Force,” she explained after a moment, “he’s one of the brightest in the Force that I’ve ever seen. And judging by your lack of surprise, you know he uses the Force. Is it really so strange that when he saw his guardian hurt, he’d ask for help?”

“And you’re that help, huh?”

“The Force works in mysterious ways,” she said and he got the strange sense that she was quoting something. “Even those of us that follow it never truly understand it.” She held out her hand again, offering, her gaze open and earnest. “So please, let me help you.”

Din considered her words for a long moment, and considered the kid, still calm. He was beginning to lose feeling in his fingers. He’d had to risk it, or risk leaving the kid defenseless and alone with a potentially dangerous stranger.

Releasing a sigh he nodded and let himself relax, hand falling away. “Do what you must.”

He would admit that he had expected her to be like the kid, to use the Force to heal him. He had not expected her to hold out a hand behind her and have a bag fly into it. If he weren’t used to seeing the child move things by now, he might have thought that he was hallucinating. A moment later, medical supplies were scattered onto the ground and she was rummaging through them.

The child, now reassured that his guardian didn’t consider the new person a threat, finally clambered out from under his loosening grip and climbed over him towards the injury with a single-minded focus.

Din watched as the child closed his eyes and reached out a hand and remembered another time, so long ago, when the child had tried to do this for him. He hadn’t understood then. He did now.

The atmosphere changed again, became heavy but not in an unpleasant way, and there new ally’s attention snapped over to the child, alarmed.

“No little one,” she caught hold of the kid’s hand and he barely held back the urge to fight. She seemed panicked. There had to be a reason that she had stopped his son. There was. “The cost is too high.”

“The cost?” he asked, voice thready but stomach roiling at the thought that the child might be putting itself at risk for his sake.

“To heal is to give away one’s own life force,” she explained abruptly and his heart dropped.

“You mean?” He didn’t have the strength to finish the sentence. The implications were horrifying and his brain shied away from them. What damage had already been done? Was it too late? His hand curled around his little one, leaving red smears on his clothes.

She seemed to sense that she had upset him. “He’s fine, Mandalorian. He must be incredibly skilled to even be able to do it. But healing is not something to be used lightly. Make sure he knows that and he’ll continue to be fine.”

“Right.” He swallowed down the nausea and focused on the instruction. He could do it. He could teach him that.

She laid several hypo-sprays out, and a couple of other tools he vaguely recognized. The adrenaline rush the near-fight and then the revelation about the reality of the child’s healing powers was wearing off and he was beginning to find it hard to focus again.

“Coagulant,” she explained, holding some of the vials up for inspection. “Painkiller. Antibiotics.” He nodded. He suspected that he’d be needing the effects of the first one sharpish if the pool on the floor was anything to go by.

When she reached for his side, he didn’t stop her, talking her through the removal of the armour as quickly as he could, increasingly aware of how cold and shaky he was feeling. The moment she saw skin, she used the hypo-sprays in quick succession.

He let out a hiss between his teeth as she finally pulled the sodden fabric away from his side and then watched as she froze.

“Kriff,” she swore.

He looked down and immediately wished he hadn’t. He’d known it was bad, he hadn’t realized it was that bad. He was fairly sure that was bone.

“This needs sealing. Now. I can’t heal that, I don’t have the skill.”

She didn’t even suggest allowing the child to have a go and Din felt his respect for her grow just a little at that.

Din knew that he should feel more concerned about her sudden urgency but whatever had been in those hypo-sprays was making everything feel somewhat distant in the way that heavy drugs did. He watched as she rummaged quickly through her bag and then dropped it with a frustrated noise.

“Don’t suppose you’ve got a cauterizer?”

“Not on me,” he replied, thinking of the tool rack back on the ship, far too far away to be of any use.

She cursed and turned her head away, frantically scanning the room for anything that might be of use and then –

“Mandalorian, I’m going to need you to trust me.”

“Why?” he asked. It was a strange choice of words.

“Because there’s only one thing here hot enough to seal that before you bleed out.”

He followed her gaze down to the handle of her strange light-blade weapon.

“Oh,” he said eloquently.

“Yeah,” she confirmed.

Did he trust her enough to let her ignite a weapon so close to the little one with no way of knowing if she would help him or kill him? He didn’t know. What he did know was that she’d already wasted some fairly expensive supplies on trying to fix him up and that she could have killed him earlier, with ease, but hadn’t.

He glanced over at the weapon again. Really, he only had one option. He had been struggling to focus for too long, they didn’t have the luxury of time. The kid needed him.

“Do it.”

She nodded and moved, reaching for the staff.

“You might want to bite on something under there,” she said.

“Right,” he agreed, well aware of how much this was going to hurt even with the drugs. His right glove was coated in blood, but the other was relatively clean so he pulled it off carefully and pushed it between the seal of his helmet, catching hold between his teeth.

“Right,” she echoed, lifting the staff with one hand and adjusting some of the controls before carefully resting the other arm over across his torso above the wound, pressing down with more force than he had expected of someone her size. “Try not to pass out on me.”

The blade ignited with a low humming sound as she brought it closer to his side, close enough that he could feel the heat coming off it. She looked up at him for the go ahead, which he appreciated and he nodded for her to continue and then braced himself as well as he could.

He watched as the blade inched closer and closer and then he dragged his gaze away, feeling his breathing speed up in anticipation of pain.

Then his world exploded. Fierce, fiery hurt of a kind he’d never felt before slammed into him, knocking the air from his lungs. His only instinct in that moment was to get away but he couldn’t, he couldn’t move and it hurt so much that he saw stars. It became all he knew.

Then, after what felt like hours but could only have been seconds, the immediate pain stopped and instead throbs of agony radiated from his side.

Someone was screaming.

He was screaming.

“Breathe!”

The voice broke through the fog and he gasped in a breath of air and immediately gasped it out again as the pain flared. Everything was spinning, blurring. He choked, spat out the glove and let it drop into his lap. Swallowed, breathed, swallowed again. The world was warping and fading, his ears ringing.

He heard the child calling out to him – then nothing.

Awareness returned slowly.

First, the sound of a crackling fire and quiet voices talking. Then, the smell of wood smoke, the feel of the hard ground and the soft fabric of a makeshift pillow brushing against the back of his neck. The pinch of something in his arm.

His eyes snapped open, already moving to push himself up, to get at whatever was in his arm, hand reaching for the offending article as the unfamiliar voices suddenly cut themselves off.

Pain, deep, sharp and sudden in his side.

“Leave it alone, Mandalorian,” said a voice he didn’t recognize. “It’s plasma and you need it.”

He hadn’t even noticed that his eyes had shut, the sudden hurt had been so overwhelming. He had slumped back against the rolled up blanket that had been serving as a pillow. The pain in his side had also reminded him of exactly what had happened to land him in this state.

“Where?” His voice was weak, his throat horribly dry. “Where am I?”

“Still on Christophses, by the cantina,” the new voice responded as he tried to focus on the blurry figure now beside him. “You needed plasma, so there’s an infusion line in your arm. Leave it be.” The image above him settled, allowing him to examine the new arrival. Lekku, montrals. Togruta.

“Who?”

She smiled softly. “I am Marin. I believe you are already familiar with my student, Saoirse?” The woman from the cantina, the one with the strange light weapon waved from beside the fire. “When you wouldn’t wake, she sent for help.”

Slowly, Din began to lift himself and this time the world didn’t spin and blur. The pain was still bad – very bad – but it was bearable, and with one of Marin’s hands hovering, he was able to sit up, propped against a broken table as he breathed through the burning in his side.

He had the niggling feeling he was forgetting something.

“The kid!” He looked around frantically, pushing aside his own discomfort. If they’d done anything to the child then no injury would hold him down –

“He’s here,” Saoirse said, indicating a basket by her side which, he spotted, had sprouted a pair of long green ears, twitching in his sleep at the noise they were making. “He refused to leave your side, even to sleep. We finally got him to rest a few hours ago. He’s very stubborn.”

Relaxing at the confirmation that his son was safe, Din took a moment to check himself over. His side had been wrapped and there was indeed an infusion line inserted into the crook of his elbow, but aside from that everything seemed to be untouched and in order. So far, so good.

“Plasma?” he asked, fiddling with the line.

“You lost a lot of blood, before Saoirse was able to cauterize your wound,” Marin explained. “I was exploring the ruins in the forest nearby when she called. You are lucky that Saoirse has not finished her training, or else I would have let her come alone. The Force was with you today.”

Din felt a little lost in the face of their kindness. He wasn’t used to being treated this way. Most people would have left him for dead and looted what they could, but these two not- _jetii_ had gone out of their way to help him. He knew these sort of supplies weren’t cheap.

“What do I owe you?”

Marin hissed, baring her teeth in discomfort at the thought. “Nonsense. You owe us nothing except to look after yourself.”

Din swallowed down the emotion rising in his throat. “Thank you.”

“Thank your son for calling for us,” Marin replied. “He is very gifted.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “He is.”

“Have you been looking after him long?”

Din hesitated, weighing up the risk of telling them about the child. There was a chance that they might be playing an elaborate double bluff on him, but if they were able to use this Force, then maybe they would know something about the child.

“Just over a year,” he said carefully. “There was a bounty on him. I took it, not knowing that he was a child and once I had him – I couldn’t go through with it. I've been taking care of him since. By the custom of my people, I am his guardian until he is of age or reunited with his own.”

“Is that why you were out here? Avoiding other bounty hunters?”

“Following a lead, up until the moment my contact betrayed us.”

Marin hummed, “I have to admit, seeing the little one did surprise me. It has been a long time since I have seen one of his species.”

The words took a moment to sink in but when they did Din straightened sharply, ignoring the flash of pain that came with it, and turned to her.

“You’ve seen one of his kind before?”

“Sit still!” She pushed him back again, fussing until she was certain he hadn’t done any more damage to himself. “But to answer your question, yes, I have.”

“Who? Where?”

“Patience, Mandalorian,” Marin said, but he could see the amusement on her face. “You have heard of the Jedi, yes?” He nodded. “I met the head of the Jedi Order once, during the clone wars, on Coruscant. His name was Yoda and he was of the same species as your little one and very strong in the Force.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“Not for certain I’m afraid. I know he survived the great purge and the slaughter of the Jedi. The last I heard, he was on Dagobah.”

“Dagobah,” he repeated, rolling the word around in his mouth.

This was the best lead he’d had in over a year and it had come from a chance encounter with two strangers on a far-flung world. They could be lying to him, but they didn’t give off that shifty aura that so often accompanied liars. It seemed too good to be true, but then again, so much of what the child had done with the help of this mysterious Force had been beyond belief.

This could be it, he realized. This could be what he needed to return the child to his own kind. Just as quickly as the thought came, he wanted to dismiss it.

Faced with the possibility of letting his son go, he realized just how attached he had grown.

It scared him, the strength of his emotions.

Almost as though he could sense his father’s turmoil – although maybe he could, it was becoming increasingly clear that Din knew very little about the child and his connection with the Force – the child woke with a series of familiar chirps and coos growing increasingly loud and demanding.

“I think he wants you,” Saoirse said, moving to join them with the basket held in his arms.

From within the bundle of blankets, Din could see the child blinking sleepily and reaching out towards him. With his free arm, he reached out and scooped him up, drawing him in close to his chest and letting the child run its claws over his armour and helmet until he was satisfied that his guardian was ok.

“I’m alright _ad’ika_ ,” he said, gently pressing their foreheads together, metal to skin.

The child cooed, and settled nestled into the gap between his pauldron and his helmet, already drifting back to sleep. He must be exhausted. Din usually had trouble getting him back to sleep if his nap was interrupted.

Beside him, Marin was watching them with a knowing smile.

“I hope you find what you are looking for, Mandalorian,” she said and he got the sense that she wasn’t just talking about his quest to find the child’s people. “But for now, rest. We will guard you until you are ready.”

She stood, picking up her own staff and took up a position on the edge of their little camp, watching the tree line. Din could feel his own eyes growing heavy, despite the frantic whirring of his thoughts, yet he also felt oddly safe so when his eyes fell closed, he didn’t fight to open them again.

His dreams were filled with the bright flashes of light swords, the noises of a strange marsh-like jungle, and of the child.


	3. I. The Swamp

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Din follows a lead to a far-flung planet called Dagobah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's official, Din Djarin is the best dad.
> 
> This chapter references the events of 'After the Storm'.

Dagobah, the database on the Razor Crest informed him, was essentially one massive swamp.

From his position curled up on his lap, the _ad’ika_ watched the holo of the planet rotating with wide eyes. Din kept him secure with an arm wrapped around him. Usually it was a precaution against the baby’s tendency to press buttons that he really shouldn’t but today it was more out of self-preservation.

He was still recovering from the battle in the cantina. Plasma can only do so much for blood loss, eventually it fell to his own body to replace what he lost and that takes time - time he hadn’t been sure they had the luxury of. If his contact had already sent one load of bandits after him then there was no guarantee that there wouldn’t be more on the way, so as soon as he could stand without keeling over, he’d taken his leave of his new allies with words of thanks that had felt woefully inadequate.

He’d added a nasty new scar to his collection, although it was healing well courtesy of the mysterious Marin and Saoirse, and, whilst it was preferable to being dead, it still hurt more often than not.

The last thing it needed was an overactive toddler wriggling around and poking it.

“What do you think, kid?” Din asked, reaching out to twirl the holo, examining the planet from all possible angles. “Does it look like home to you?”

The child reached out his little hands towards the model, clapping in excitement, so Din leaned forward, helping him reach. All the baby did was mimic his movements, causing the holo to spin and whirl, and let out happy chirps. Not exactly an answer, but at least he was entertained.

“Dagobah,” Din read aloud having learned some time ago that the baby liked the sound of his voice, especially sans helmet. It had felt strange initially, to so freely show his face to another, but over time it had grown familiar, comfortable. Now, he usually discarded his helmet the moment he was certain they were alone. “Is a planet in the Outer Rim Territories, located in the Sluis sector. The terrain is primarily made up of wetlands and s- and,” the word caught and he swallowed hard. Another one.

The child looked up at the sudden break in his speech, ears drooping in concern, gathering that something was wrong but not being sure what. Din gathered him up and turned, heading over to the back wall of the cockpit with the _ad’ika_ tucked into his arm. With his free hand, he grabbed the piece of chalk tied to the wall and added a new word to the list.

At first, the list had grown rapidly as he discovered which words his head injury on Navarro had taken from him. It had seemed daunting, and scary, even with Cara’s help finding alterative terms on those first few days of disorientation. He had hoped, back then, that it was just temporary, but he’d been living with it for over a year now and he beginning to suspect that it was something he was never going to recover from.

At least the headaches had stopped.

“What shall we use instead, _ad’ika_?” he asked, tapping the chalk against the wall in thought. “Bog? Quagmire? Marsh?” The baby cooed at the final word, ears perking up, so he scrawled it on the wall in the appropriate column. “Marsh it is.”

He ran his eyes over the list, far longer than he was really happy with, but taking some comfort in the knowledge that the last time he had added a word had been months ago. The _ad’ika_ made a small noise and reached out towards the newly written words.

“Yes, we can carry on reading now, can’t we?”

Picking up the datapad, he returned to his chair and continued where he had left off.

“The terrain is primarily made up of wetlands and marshes, although there are also networks of caves. The climate is dependent on the season. In the wet season, the planet experiences violent rain and lightning storms. In the dry, the surface temperature can rise high enough that habitation becomes difficult above ground. Native sentient species, the Tash.”

There was nothing on the datapad about the child’s species, but he’d come to expect that. In his lap, the child had lost interest in the holo and had returned to chewing on the mythosaur necklace. Din was pretty sure he was teething and had become skilled at convincing the kid to chew on something softer instead of the hard beskar pendant, so he plied the little one with a chew ring he’d picked up on their last pit stop.

He scanned the datapad again, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything important, checked their supplies to make sure they had enough for the trip, and then began to set the coordinates for the jump to hyperspace.

“Well, even if it isn’t your home, it’s our best lead, so it’s worth taking a look. See if we can find this Yoda, huh?”

The child cooed. He took it as agreement.

With the coordinates set, he picked up the child – he really needed to give him a name – and twisted to strap him into the basket on his own seat, which had been carefully designed and tested to make sure it would keep a baby safe through any number of maneuvers.

Halfway through the movement his side flared and he had to stop and take a few deep breaths as he waited for it to settle. The kid’s ears had drooped again and he reached out towards him, claws brushing against his cheek.

“I’m ok, _ad’ika_ ,” he reassured, “I just need a moment.”

When the pain calmed, he finished strapping the child in, gently tucking the blanket around him and ensuring that he had the little ball from his favourite control held tightly. Once he was sure the kid was ready, he reached out for the switch that would initiate the jump to hyperspace. The kid made an excited noise when he saw what they were doing.

“That’s right,” he said, unable to contain a smile, “it’s your favourite part.”

The stars blurred and stretched as they jumped and the kid released squeals of delight as he watched the lights flashing past, each one bringing them a little closer to the far-flung planet of Dagobah and, hopefully, answers.

His first impression of Dagobah from the planet’s surface was that, even in the wet season, it was hot. The air was humid and sticky and he was sweating even before he reached the bottom of the ramp. The child, held securely in a makeshift swaddle was looking around, clearly curious. Though the climate didn’t seem to be affecting the kid adversely, which was a small mercy.

It had been hard finding a place flat and stable enough to land and he hadn’t seen any signs of habitation or of a past landing during his search. Of course, that didn’t mean there was nothing here, but it made his job much harder.

The kid stretched out, trying to reach one of the flying bugs that had come a little too close. Din reached out, brushing it away.

“No, _ad’ika_. Remember what I said? We don’t eat strange things.”

The child huffed, but relented. Sometimes, he wondered how much the little one understood. There were times he could swear the kid recognized what he was saying, and others when he was equally sure that the kid didn’t understand a word.

He had ended up landing beside a body of water, so he carefully approached the shoreline and looked around, taking in the sounds of the local wildlife from the dense jungle around them.

“Anything looking familiar to you?” The kid looked up at the sound of his voice with an inquisitive noise, the mythosaur pendant held tightly in his claws. “I’ll take that as a no.”

This Yoda could be anywhere on the planet, if he was even here at all. He had been hoping that the child would have sensed something, like Saoirse and Marin had been able to sense the kid on Christophses, but apparently not. Instead, he was searching blind, for one person on an entire planet, with only enough supplies to last a few days. It seemed stupid, he didn’t even know where to begin, but he had to try because if there even the smallest chance that this Yoda was here then he owed it to the kid to do everything he could to find him.

Resigning himself to a long day of searching, he made sure the child was secure and that he had enough water for them, and then he picked a direction away from the water and began to walk in as straight a line as he could.

By the time he stopped for lunch, they had encounter some of the local wildlife, including a few creatures that he’d been forced to shoot when a warning shot had failed to drive them away, but there was still no sign of any sentient life, let alone anyone of the same species at the kid. If it weren’t for the child’s strange powers, Din would have written this off as dead end simply because he couldn’t imagine something as small as the child could have survived the hostile environment, at least, not without supernatural help.

Heaving a sigh, he sat on a fallen log and carefully set the child in his lap as he reached for the canteen of water and rations that he had packed. With a scan to ensure they were alone, he quickly lifted the helmet to drink and did he best to wipe away the sweat with his sleeve.

He caught the kid’s claws just as they reached the ration pack.

“Hey there, let me help you with that.”

With delicate movements honed by months of practice, he carefully broke the ration into smaller chunks and fed them to the child. Once the kid had eaten his fill he pulled off a glove and brushed his ears and head gently, checking his temperature, but he seemed fine, unaffected by the humidity.

Din made sure he had enough to drink regardless.

He was just packing away when the kid let out a surprised chirp. Din immediately checked the clearing, worried that the food had attracted one of the less-than-friendly creatures, but his scans revealed nothing.

Then he noticed that the kid wasn’t looking around. Instead, his large eyes were fixed on one of the gaps in the tree line. Again, his scans showed nothing there.

“Boo,” the kid said, catching his attention.

Din, no matter what Cara said, hadn’t been trying to get the kid to say _buir_ , but he had been using the word to refer to himself when he was talking to him. It had seemed right, in a way that he name hadn’t so he’d stuck with it. The first time the kid had come out with that in the middle of his normal babbling he’d almost given Din a heart attack.

Din may have hugged him a little longer than usual afterwards, though.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Boo!”

The kid was getting excited, but Din still couldn’t see anything between the trees that could have so enraptured his son. Unless -

“Are you sensing something? With the Force?”

“Boo! Boo!” The child was practically bouncing in his lap, reaching out towards the same trees he had been staring at with one hand and tugging at his sleeve with the other.

“Alright, _ad’ika_ , message received,” Din said, squashing down the mix of emotions rising in his chest at thought that this might already be the end of their time together, “we’ll try that way.”

There seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason to the path the child was leading him on. It certainly wasn’t following a straight line, or a natural or man-made path. For nearly an hour, he followed the _ad’ika_ ’s directions, if they could be called that.

He was beginning to think that the kid was leading him on a wild goose chase when they reached a break in the trees and the kid immediately calmed in his arms.

“Boo,” he said, in as assertive a tone as Din had ever heard him use.

Approaching with caution, one hand on his blaster, Din crept forward, scanning around as he reached the gap between the branches but he couldn’t see anything that might be a threat. Another cautious step and he could take in their destination.

The clearing was large and mostly covered in marshland, with fallen trees and logs providing makeshift bridges. It didn’t look any different to the other clearings they had come across and he certainly couldn’t see anything, or anyone, that could have gotten the kid so excited. He turned, to take in the whole of the space and came to an abrupt stop when he spotted something unexpected.

Partially hidden beneath the roots of a tree was a structure that couldn’t possibly be natural.

There were shapes that could be windows, a doorway, and a chimney.

A house.

A house. That the child had led him to. Using the Force.

There were no obvious signs of life, but Din knew that that didn’t mean no one was there. Swallowing down past the sudden lump in his throat, Din tightened his grip on his son and slowly, carefully, approached.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's this? An early chapter?  
> Yes, because I'm weak and have no self control.
> 
> Mando'a translations:  
> buir - father/mother/parent


	4. I. The Ghost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Din comes across some good news, some bad news, and is generally out of his depth.

There were two types of empty house.

The first were the houses that had been temporarily vacated. These houses were living houses, full of light, colour, clutter, half-finished jobs. The second were ghost houses. In those places, dust had gathered, opportunists had looted, and nature reclaimed. They had an atmosphere of emptiness.

Din knew even before he stepped inside the hut on Dagobah that this house fell in the latter category.

He had to duck to get through the doorway, one hand resting atop the child’s head protectively as he bent down. There was no light in the building except that which crept in from outside, leaking through gaps in the vines and roots. The layer of dust and dirt confirmed Din’s suspicion that the owner had been away for a long time.

Nevertheless, he did a quick check of every room to ensure they were alone before letting himself relax his guard, finding one of the few places where he could stand upright to view their bleak surroundings. The child was looking around as well, wiggling slightly in his arms, but his ears were lowering with each passing second as he realized that whatever he had been following was but a trace of a long-lost soul.

“I’m sorry, kid,” Din said, brushing a hand over one of those dipping ears in comfort. “They’re long gone.”

The child made a small, sad noise.

Having done an initial sweep for occupants, Din started a slower, more painstaking one of the contents of the house. There was a chance, no matter how slim, that somewhere in the past owner’s remaining possessions was a clue or a hint as to either where they had gone, or who they were.

The more he looked, the more convinced he became that this had once been the home of one of the child’s species. Whether it was this Yoda that Marin had mentioned or not remained to be seen, but the furniture was about the right height for what he imagined the child might look like fully grown and, most promisingly, there were footprints in some of the corners and under leaves he brushed away that matched the feet of the infant. It was the first real sign that they were on the right track.

“See, _ad’ika_?” he asked, pointing to one such mark. “There was someone living here who was like you.”

The child chirped and reached down a hand towards the marks left by previous occupant. Din set him down and watched as he toddled over to touch them, comparing the impressions with his own footprints.

With the child occupied, he turned his attention to the one other element of the house that had shown promise. On the opposite side of the room was a shelf containing what Din believed to be actual books with flimsi pages.

He reached out towards one and stopped, inches away, reconsidering. Then, he pulled off his gloves, and with bare fingers, gently pulled one of the books from its resting place, cradling it as though it would break if he mishandled it.

He had to brush a hand across the cover to get rid of the layer of dirt that had built up over time and found that there was nothing to indicate what it might contain, no inscription or image. Mindful of the movements of the child, he sat down against the wall, propped the book up on his legs, and very carefully opened it.

The author had left no title, or description, they had merely started writing.

To Din’s relief, the book had at least been written in basic because he hadn’t got the faintest idea what the child’s native language might be and he suspected it wasn’t going to be one he knew.

The first page was nothing especially exciting. From what Din could decipher it was a list of materials, perhaps what was needed to make the building they were now in.

Turning the page proved interesting. The flimsi had grown delicate with age and he almost tore it despite his care. The sheets crinkled, the sound almost alien to him, as he managed to get them turned without damaging them. The sound also attracted the child, his ears flicking in interest and he turned away from the footprints and wandered back over to stand by his side, eyes wide and fixed on the book.

Din looped an arm around him and pulled him onto his lap so that they could both see the writing.

The next page answered a lot of questions, but posed many more. It was messy, as though written in a hurry, and there were a lot of names that Din didn’t recognise. Skywalker. Kenobi. Windu. The author talked of two children put into hiding for their own safety. They wrote of the loss of almost the entirety of the Jedi Order, and of the crushing failure of the order to eliminate something they called a ‘sith’.

It didn’t help that the pattern of speak apparent in the writing was confusing, and backwards, and it took a few minutes for Din to get used to reading it and rearranging the words in his head so that they made sense.

It was halfway through the fifth or sixth page that the author revealed themselves.

_Grand master no longer, I am. Simply Yoda, once more, I have become._

“It’s him,” he breathed, dropping his head down to look at his son, “Yoda, the Jedi that Marin knew.”

“Boo,” the child murmured, one hand patting his cuirass, and then he reached, pointing at the book. “Yo’a?”

“Yeah,” Din confirmed, his voice heavy with an emotion he couldn’t quite place, relief perhaps that their search hadn’t been in vain. “You brought us to the right place. Well done, little one.”

He kept reading, aloud now that he knew whose words they were.

The child seemed content to sit in his lap, watching and listening, until the darkening sky made reading the words difficult and he was forced to stop. He didn’t want to waste his power reserves using his torch to read, and didn’t want to light a fire in case it attracted predators, so he carefully closed the book and set it down beside the child.

The book had been a mixture of notes, memoirs, and lists, but Din had gained a few important pieces of information from it already that might help in his search. One was that there had, at one point, been a Jedi temple on Coruscant and that there might still be something there. Another was that some of the Jedi had survived, scattered across the known universe.

The last was that was a lot about of the Force that he didn’t know or understand. Yoda referenced various things he had done with the Force that Din couldn’t really wrap his head around and others that were alarmingly familiar because he’d seen the child do them.

He didn’t even know, he realised, how much the child knew, or what he was capable of doing.

The child, who had apparently dozed off curled up in his lap.

Din watched as his ears twitched in his sleep, as the child tightened his grip on his shirt and tucked himself into the body heat he was giving off. He considered moving him for the briefest of moments, but lately he’d been having trouble convincing the baby to sleep and he often woke to find the little one had somehow snuck into his bed overnight. The last thing he wanted to do was wake him by moving him.

Besides, it wasn’t as though he had been intended to do anything in particular now that the light had faded enough that it was no longer easy to read.

With a quick check of his surroundings and of his weapons, he let his head fall back against the wall, curling his arms around the child, just in case, and let his own exhaustion overtake him.

Danger.

_Danger!_

Something screamed at him to move.

Din’s eyes snapped open and his hand shot up, catching hold of the hand wielding the knife moments before it reached the child’s sleeping form.

With his left arm he threw a punch at where he hoped their attacker’s head was because it was dark enough that he could barely make them out. Thankfully the hit connected, hard, and he heard the crunch of bone and the hiss of a curse. He twisted with his other hand, forcing the attacker’s wrist to bend unnaturally, painfully, until the knife dropped with a clatter.

It was awkward and quite painful, reaching across with to pull his blaster free from its holster pulled on the scar, but he didn’t dare let up his grip on the attacker’s arm, forcing them to contort further to relieve the pressure. As he struggled with his gun, he kicked out and knocked the attacker’s leg out from under him, forcing them to fall abruptly to their knees with a grunt. The blaster took a bit of wriggling to come free, but he managed and used the weapon’s torch to illuminate the unfortunate hunter-turned-prey.

The first thing he noticed was that their attacker was human – or at least he looked human – and that he was hunched over awkwardly, the dimensions of the room forcing him to crouch down in order to fit. It meant that Din, sat on the floor as he was, was almost at an advantage in the space.

The second thing he noticed was that he had, indeed, broken the man’s nose, and there was a trickle of blood dripping onto the floor which he observed with grim satisfaction.

The child, he noticed, had clambered off his lap and had tucked himself behind the bulk of his body and, although Din could feel the little one shivering slightly, he seemed to be unharmed. He took a moment to be thankful for that before he drew all his focus upon his captive.

“Why are you here?”

The man sneered and tried to buck out of his grip but Din simply cocked the gun in response, finger resting lightly over the trigger. The man looked him over, and then let his gaze fall briefly to the child. There was a glint in his eyes that Din really didn’t like.

“So the rumours are true, you are a guild traitor.”

“Better a traitor than a child murderer,” he shot back, hackles raised by everything about him.

The man laughed, dark and humourless. “You enjoy being hunted, Mandalorian? There’s a lot more coming for that child. Some are even coming for you.” Din didn’t respond in any way. He found that sometimes letting people talk gained him useful intel, such as the information that there was not only a bounty out on the child, there was also now one out on him. But apparently this guy had already exhausted his limited chance at survival because he followed the information up with an insult. “I bet you can’t even shoot me. I bet you’ve got soft.”

It was unlikely that this man knew the connotations of being called soft in Mandalorian culture but Din had no plans of informing him of his mistake.

He just proved him wrong instead.

The room illuminated with a flash as the blaster bolt burned through the man’s head. Immediately, his body went slack and Din let go, allowing him to drop to the floor and appreciating the mild look of surprise that lingered on the hunter’s face.

“You ok, _ad’ika_?” he asked as he swept the light around the rest of the hut, checking for any signs of other hunters.

The child let out a quiet noise, but it wasn’t a distressed sound. Din had, over time, learnt to distinguish which noises the child made when he was genuinely upset, or hurt. He could feel the child’s claws twisting in the material of his trousers.

Having assured himself that they were safe, at least for now, he bent forward, pushing aside the small flare of pain from his side, and began to dig through the dead man’s pockets until he found the puck.

He took great pleasure in crushing it beneath his boot.

Neither of them slept again that night.

The following morning, the moment it was light enough to see, Din began to pack. Between shoving things into his bag, he fed the child small chunks torn from a ration bar. Once the child had eaten enough, he shrugged the sling back on and tucked the little one in, making sure he was firmly swaddled so that he wouldn’t be jostled, or worse fall, even if he was forced to make a run for it.

The books he hesitated over. There were too many to carry. In the end, he settled on taking the one he had been reading and the two books beside it that looked to be of the same make.

With everything packed, he dragged the hunter’s body outside and left it slumped against one of the roots of the tree. He had no doubt that the creatures that inhabited this planet would deal with the remains. A few seconds of scuffing the layers of dirt around he had covered up the blood smears and just like that, it was as though they had never been there.

“Time to go,” he said, pulling up the map of the path they had taken to get there on his visor.

As he picked his way over fallen branches and vines, he got the strangest feeling that something was watching him, but when he turned back to the house, ready for a fight if needed, there was nothing there.

The child chirped softly, head titling as he too looked back at the hut, but he didn’t complain when Din resumed his path back towards the Razor Crest.

He had found the noises of the marsh and the forest disconcerting on the way in, but now that he knew there were hunters still on their tail, he was glad for both the cover the noise granted them, and also the warning. He moved quickly, but cautiously, ignoring the heat the best he could and listening out for any changes in the noise around them that might indicate animals being spooked by another hunter.

They were only a few minutes out from the Razor Crest when it happened.

Suddenly, a feeling of intense distress flashed through his mind. But it felt discomforting, intrusive and weirdly echoing, as though it were but a mirror of someone else’s emotions.

His body reacted to the sensation before he could comprehend what was happening and he whirled around, looking for danger. His visor highlighted something above his line of sight and he looked up to find one of the large, cat-like predator creatures crouched in the branches above them, mere moments away from attacking. He pulled his blaster and fired, not even going for a warning shot, the sensation of something other than himself in head putting him firmly on edge. As the body hit the ground he felt the distress slowly leaking away until it solidified as a calm warmth on the edge of his perception.

“What the fuck?” he asked, hushed and trembling.

In his arms, the child warbled and wriggled and he glanced down to find the kid looking up at him with an expression he had only seen a few times. Enough times to interpret it as guilty. Taking a few deep breaths he did his best to calm the instincts that were telling him to get far away because there was no way to get far away from this. “Was that you, _ad’ika_?”

“Ah,” the kid murmured with a timid nod, his head dropped and claws tentatively curling into the edge of his cloak.

“Was that – did you – in my head? How did you – how did you do that?”

He was still shaking, a mixture of adrenaline and fear.

“Eh?”

“You can’t – of course you can’t explain,” he said, part of him wanting to break into hysterics because of course something like this would happen to him with a child that couldn’t talk back, as least, not in any conventional sense.

“Boo?” the kid sounded nervous and in spite of his anger and confusion, the sound tugged at his heart, drawing him back to himself.

Slumping back against a tree, he stoked one of the child’s ears as gently as he could, hoping that the child could sense that he wasn’t going to – to hurt him or anything like that. It was hard even thinking that the child might have been treated badly before, let alone that his actions had caused this uncertainty and caution.

“I’m sorry, _ ad’ika_,” he said, “I didn’t mean to frighten you, it’s just – whatever you just did, it’s, well, it’s not ok. I get why you did it, but it’s, it’s scary for me.” Terrifying actually, to have no control whatsoever about what was happening. “I’m not used to having someone else up here.” He tapped a finger against his helmet. “Do you understand?”

The child murmured, his ears perking up a little and he gently tapped a claw against his cuirass. As he did so, Din felt the slight pressure at the edge of his mind ease and vanish.

“Boo?”

“That’s good, thank you,” he said, slowly picking himself back up and resuming the walk back to the Crest. “I think maybe both of us could do with working out what you can actually do, huh?”

The child hummed and cooed, back to his usual self with the resilience that children so often exhibitions. The comlink Marin had given to him lay heavy in his pocket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the kind comments! They have really helped me motivate myself to write regularly (and actually plan a fic out for once!)


	5. I. The Lesson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Din needs answers and he happens to know someone who might be able to give them to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a long one and it's a bit early because I'm out this evening!  
> Thank you again for all the lovely comments and support. You guys are amazing. <3

Compared to the balmy, humid warmth of Dagobah, the Razor Crest was delightfully cool.

Din made sure that the child was wrapped up against the chill. Although he had never seemed bothered by the lower temperature of the ship, Din knew that such a rapid change in heat level could be a shock, especially for an infant.

There hadn’t been another incident of unexpected telepathy since the child had warned him about the predator in the trees, but it had put Din on edge and he couldn’t shake the anxiety he now felt about the possibility that at any moment the privacy of his own thoughts could be invaded and overwritten.

For now, though, the child was fighting against sleep with drooping ears and slowly blinking eyes, and losing.

Din tucked him into his seat in the cockpit rather than in his cabin below, wanting to be nearby should anything happen – if he could communicate like that, what might the child do without realising if he had a nightmare? Then he turned his attention to the blinking light of the ship’s comms system which was demanding his attention.

There were very few people who knew how to contact the Razor Crest. The covert knew, of course, because technically the Crest didn’t belong to him but to the covert. Greef Karga knew as well, at first for bounty updates and now usually for updates on Nevarro and Imperial movements. Cara was a recent addition and she had taken to checking up on him regularly to make sure his head was still screwed on straight, which he outwardly tolerated and inwardly appreciated.

In the time it had taken for him to get to Yoda’s hut and back, the Razor Crest had received two new messages.

The first took a massive weight off his shoulders.

It was short and to the point - a set of co-ordinates and a short line of Mando’a – but it told him all he needed to know. It confirmed that the Armourer, his _alor_ , was alive and safe and had found a new location for the covert. He was surprised to see that she was still on Nevarro, she hadn’t really moved far at all, but he trusted her judgement far more than his own.

The second message was from Cara. Her little hologram popped up as usual with a cheeky grin and a wave.

_‘Hey Din! Just to let you know that Nevarro is still boring me out of my mind. Don’t forget to feed the kid and look after yourself. Hope to see you again sometime soon, preferably before I shoot someone to break the monotony and get myself fired.’_

His mouth had ticked up into a smile throughout the message. She had taken to calling him Din when they were alone and it was… nice.

For a moment he did consider taking her up on the offer. He could go and visit the Armourer too, to deliver credits and share what he had learned and show her the books, now securely and carefully stored in a compartment in the cargo hold. Besides, if he was going to have to go to Coruscant, he’d rather not go alone.

Beside him, the kid murmured in his sleep.

He was sure that the child hadn’t meant him any harm, had only barged in because he sensed danger, but he didn’t want to risk potentially putting his friends in a position where the kid might do the same to them until he knew more about what the child was actually doing and, ideally, how to stop him if needed.

Even now, he remembered vividly how it had felt - emotions not his own pouring into him, a presence on the edge of his consciousness and him, powerless to stop it.

Marin’s comms details were in his pocket.

Realistically, this needed to take priority.

Nevertheless, he hesitated for a moment over the controls before he shut down Cara’s message and reached for the data stick from the pair of not- _jetii_ , the only other Force users he knew of besides the child. Copying over the data, he sent a quick message, double-checked that the ship was secure and then, he settled in to wait.

The reply came several hours later and jolted him out of his sleep where he had dozed off in the chair. Half-awake as he was it took a few seconds for him to work out where the noise was coming from.

Marin had sent back a set of co-ordinates.

He pulled them up and found that they matched a moon in a part of the Outer Rim that he didn’t know particularly well. The name was vaguely familiar, he was sure that he’d heard Nova mentioned as having a trading post in the past, but he’d never personally visited.

A quick glance behind him reassured him that the child was safe, well, and still asleep.

As quietly as he could, he powered up the Razor Crest, piloting them out of the atmosphere until they reached the minimum safe distance for a jump to hyperspace. He locked the co-ordinates in and plotted a route that would drop them a little way out, just in case any unpleasant surprises were awaiting them.

Some people would call it paranoia. He considered it a reasonable level of caution for people in their position.

After the bounty hunter on Dagobah, he wasn’t going to take any chances.

Nova was fairly tame, as occupied territories went.

When they had dropped out of hyperspace the kid had been awake and attempting to worm his way onto his lap. Nothing hostile had appeared to greet them and a quick scan showed a few small settlements on the surface and one equally small trading post. It was as expected for a place so remote, far enough away from the busier hyperspace lanes that it didn’t see many customers.

It was, he thought, a good place for a group of Force users to live. Quiet.

The co-ordinates that Marin had sent directed him to one of the more remote villages so he took hold of the controls and began to guide them in, avoiding the trading post any heat that might bring. On his lap, the child was becoming alert far quicker than usual, bouncing slightly with excitement.

Din wondered if he could feel others like him on the surface below.

The village was mostly surrounded by woodland, giving him very few options for landing spots. The choice of location was probably intentional, ensuring that the population would be warned of any potential attack. Din didn’t really like it, but the kid was happy and he really needed to know what the child had done to him. He touched down in one of the clearings nearby and gathered his gear, erring over the weapons before deciding that it was better safe than sorry with a bounty on both their heads and hunters out there foolish enough to take the pucks.

However, the closer he got to the settlement, the less certain he became that they were in the right place. The houses were basic and simply built, the fields full of crops, and the people going about their daily chores. It wasn’t at all what he had pictured. He had expected a stronghold of Force users to be better fortified, perhaps for there to be a temple like the ones Yoda had described in his books.

It wasn’t until he spotted the guards by the gates that Din knew he was exactly where he needed to be. He recognised the staffs they were wielding as eerily similar to the light weapons carried by Saoirse and Marin.

“Halt!” one of them called as he approached.

Din stopped, well aware of what those weapons were capable of, hands held out in front of him away from his owns weapons and, at the same time, shielding the child who was wriggling about in the sling.

“I’m here at the invitation of Marin,” he called.

It was the moment of truth, where he would find out whether or not Marin was an ally or an enemy.

The guards conversed for a minute and then one of them turned and headed into the village and the other beckoned him closer. He stopped just out of reach of the staff.

“I must ask you to wait here,” the guard said and up close Din could see they were Nagai.

He wondered how many different species lived here. “I understand,” he said and slowly lowered his hands. The guard didn’t move to correct him.

Now that he was closer to the village he could see that not all of the citizens were working in the fields or doing chores as he had initially thought. In what looked to be the main square a group of people all shapes, sizes and species were practising with wooden staffs, clearly running drills. The way they moved was almost hypnotic, precise and graceful. He could appreciate the skill behind the movements. It was oddly familiar to watch, like being home. The group turned and he couldn’t stop a sharp inhale as he realised that one of the women was clearly pregnant and yet still following the group with that same grace and speed.

Approaching footsteps finally drew his gaze away and he saw the other guard had returned with a very familiar Togruta. So, an ally it was. He was glad that his instincts had been right and his fear unfounded.

“Mandalorian,” Marin greeted and the guards finally relaxed at her recognition of him, “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon.”

He offered her a smile before realising that she couldn’t see it. “I’ve come seeking wisdom, and answers.” He indicated towards the sling, where the child’s head was now poking out.

Marin nodded as though she had expected it and stepped aside, gesturing for him to follow her into the village.

With a deep breath, he stepped forward into the unknown.

Marin’s home was small and tidy and were it not the few personal items scattered around it could have belonged to any poor farmer.

“Welcome to my home, Mandalorian,” she said with a knowing look at his helmet. “I would offer you a drink, but perhaps something for the child?”

“Yes,” he replied. The kid had been getting more and more restless the further into the village they moved. “He likes soup.”

Marin nodded. “I can manage soup.”

Din settled into the chair that she offered and observed the house and the street outside as he extracted the child from the sling with movements that were quickly becoming as familiar to him as breathing. The kid calmed a little once he had something to eat and seemed content to sit, sip, and watch them.

He considered his words carefully.

“May I ask, what is this place?”

“This is the last settlement of the D’ai Order,” Marin said which was both informative and unhelpful.

“The D’ai?” he asked, fairly sure he was butchering the pronunciation.

Marin folded her arms on the table. “Before I answer, may I ask a question of my own?” He nodded. “What did you find on Dagobah?”

He hadn’t told her for certain that he’d gone. Once again, he wondered what was possible with the Force, or if she’d simply made an educated guess.

“An abandoned house,” he said, tracing his fingertips idly across the wooden surface. “Yoda lived there once. I found books that he had written, but he was long gone. I don’t if he left for somewhere else or died.”

Marin nodded, absorbing the implications of his words. She looked saddened by them. “I hope the books were useful at least,” she said.

“They provided a lot of answers and a great many more questions,” he admitted.

“But that’s not why you’re here,” Marin said with the certainty of the discerning.

“No,” he agreed.

She looked down at the child, who had finished his soup and was watching his gloved fingers trace patterns with rapt attention.

“What did he do?” she asked.

Explaining it was difficult. Parts of him were still convinced that it hadn’t really happened, even though every rational corner of his mind insisted it had. He stumbled through a retelling of the events on Dagobah, the predator, the child’s warning, the feeling of something other in his own head. He didn’t know what he would have done if Marin hadn’t confirmed that such things were possible for Force users.

“It is not, uncommon,” Marin said when his words ground to a halt, “some species communicate this way naturally, and perhaps he is part of one such species. However, it is possible to achieve what you have described using the Force.”

Din felt himself slump in relief at that.

“I, I don’t know what to do. I can’t teach him this, how to control it, how to stop it.”

Marin nodded thoughtfully. “He is young, too young for many of our lessons. But I can certainly teach him to shield his own mind, and in doing so give him an understanding of limitations and privacy. I can’t stop him from forming a bond with you, it might even be healthy for you both, but I understand the need for boundaries.”

“Anything you can do would help,” he said honestly.

Marin looked up from where she had been playing with the child. “I can teach you as well.”

Din frowned. “But I’m not like you, I can’t use the Force.”

Marin tilted her head and looked at him. In that moment, he felt as though she could see into his soul.

“You do not need to be a Force user to learn the basics. Anyone can learn how to protect their mind to some extent against such invasions. It won’t be fool proof, but the technique does not require knowledge of the Force, merely the willingness for work for it.” Her gaze did not falter. “Are you willing to learn, Mandalorian?”

He looked at his son who he loved and would do anything for and he thought of how terrifying it had been having someone else in his mind and having no way to communicate back, to prevent it.

“Yes.”

The first lessons, Marin informed him, would take place in the morning.

“Learning to shield is hard work, and it is tiring. I would prefer to start once you have both had a good night’s rest,” she said as she gave them a tour of the village, the _ad’ika_ once again tucked into the sling for fear of him running off. “How are you, by the way?” she asked, indicating his side.

“Better, thank you. A few twinges but nothing worrying.”

“Good,” she said.

They arrived back in the main square. The sparring session had moved on from wooden staffs. Now, the younger children were gathered around the edge of the square whilst the remaining group used the sabers with those glowing blades of light. It seemed like a recipe for disaster, but as he looked closer, Din could see the discipline and skill behind each carefully controlled movement.

“May I ask something?” he said.

“You came here for answers, did you not?” Marin said. Din turned to her, surprised by the cheekiness of her response.

“What is your role here, exactly?”

“What do you think?”

Din had watched people interacting with her for an hour or so now so he thought he had a fair idea. “I would say you were their leader.”

Marin hummed. “There is no one leader here. We lead by council. That is the way of the D’ai. I am on on the council,” she admitted, “but mainly I teach fencing.”

“Fencing? With the staffs?”

“Sometimes,” Marin replied, a smirk on her face and shrugged, “sometimes, actual fencing.” She pointed at the fence surrounding the village and Din felt a smile of his own blossoming entirely without his permission.

But something else from her explanation caught his attention, nagged at him.

“You never actually explained what the D’ai are,” Din realised. They had gotten side-tracked by the child’s abilities.

“No, I didn’t, did I?” Marin looked around. “Well then. The D’ai, much like the followers of Mandalore, are not a people but a creed. Our order is a predecessor of the Jedi,” she said. “And both orders are descendants of a group that called themselves the D’ai Bendu, the original order of Force users. Unlike the Jedi, we followed the old Bendu teachings closely, whilst the Jedi believed that emotion was a hindrance to using the Force for good, that relationships between family and friends had to be kept distant or else risk falling to darkness.”

Din made a noise of discomfort at the thought. It sounded to be the exact antithesis of what it meant to be Mandalorian, where family bonds were everything.

“Precisely,” Marin agreed. “We do not believe that. We find balance between the good and the bad and we value friendship and family. Our creed demands it.”

“Your creed?” he asked, emboldened by her openness.

Marin pointed to the fountain in the centre of the square. There was something etched on it in a language he didn’t recognise. “What does it say?”

“In the Force, all things,” Marin said, “emotion and peace, knowledge and passion, courage and love, life and death.”

Din compared that with what he knew of the Jedi and decided that if his son had to learn the ways of the Force with these people, then theirs was a creed he could live with.

Marin took his silence in her stride and together, they turned back watched the drills in the square. It was getting late in the afternoon and with the light gently dimming as evening approached, the colours of the blades, blues and greens, the odd purple, yellow and orange, was strangely beautiful.

“Would you like to try?”

He turned to find Marin holding out her own staff towards him. She had clearly caught on to his fascination.

“I’m not one of the D’ai,” he said, not exactly a protest but a hesitation, a question.

“No,” she agreed, but she didn’t rescind the offer, “you are Mandalorian and if anyone understands how to respect and handle a weapon, it’s a Mandalorian, no?”

He couldn’t dispute that.

Slowly he reached out and took a hold of the staff, gloved fingers curling around the grip. It was lighter than he had expected.

“No, _ad’ika._ That’s not for you.” The kid had reached out towards the staff from his sling and he gently discouraged him, catching hold of his claws and, recognising that this wouldn’t be safe with his son in his arms, he handed him off to Marin.

“How do you?”

He didn’t finish the question but he didn’t need to. She smiled and indicated one of the switches. Taking a few steps back in remembrance of how easily the saber had cut through metal and flesh alike he readjusted his grip so that the switch was easy to reach and activate.

He glanced back over at her for a moment and at her nod of confirmation, he hit the button.

The strange hum was much louder up close and it didn’t add any weight. It was only now, with the bright, burning light inches from his hand that he could appreciate the skill and care wielding such a weapon must take for fear of causing injury to the wielder as much as an enemy.

Marin’s blades were apparently teal, between blue and green. He wondered if there was a significance to that.

“What are they called?” he asked.

“The Jedi called them lightsabers,” Marin explained.

“Lightsabers,” he repeated.

“However, we call this type of weapon a saberstaff.”

The weapon of the sorcerers, of a group that he had been taught to treat with caution, to view as an opponent on the field of battle, and he was holding it. He’d not felt this nervous about holding a weapon since his first few days of life as a foundling.

The blades continued to hum as he began to move, following the group in the square, turning and twisting much slower than they were and at a quarter the speed he would normally use a staff, treating the weapon as such but being extra careful to keep the blades away from his body, and from anyone else.

As his confidence in the weight and balance of the weapon grew, his movements became faster and smoother.

“Good,” Marin said from behind him. “You’re a natural.”

He let his motions slow to a stop and then flipped the switch and the blades of light vanished back into the hilt.

For a couple of seconds he just enjoyed the moment, the peace and calm of running drills with such a beautifully crafted weapon.

“Thank you,” he said, offering the staff back to its true owner, “for the honour.”

Marin smiled again, soft and knowing in the light of the setting suns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mando'a translations  
> alor - leader / chief


	6. I. The Memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Din continues to be oblivious to the Force. Marin is confused by this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm super busy tomorrow so I'm posting this a day early. Usual Thursday updates will return next week!

“Again.”

Din felt another drop of sweat trickle down his neck. He was exhausted, body shaking from an effort that was purely mental. It felt as though he’d spent the morning fighting for his life and yet all he had done was attempt to shield his mind from the invasion of another.

Marin had been right to wait until they were both rested.

He tried to settle his breathing from the last failed defence and built up the wall again. Shielding, Marin had explained, was easier for Force sensitives because they could draw upon the strength it offered but anyone could do it. All you had to do was envision a wall in your head, any sort of wall because the type you pictured didn’t matter in relation to how well you focused on it. You had to picture that wall and let it consume your thoughts, let it overwhelm everything else.

It sounded easy, but in reality, the moment someone started prodding, Din was fighting to keep his attention on the shield.

He pictured it again. The wall of the covert, strong, steady and reassuring. He built it up in layers, moving from the structure and shape, to the texture and colour and let everything else fall away. That, at least, had become easier.

Then Marin started pushing against it.

In their first lesson, the first time he had tried to shield, she had been gentle. Allowing him to recognise, and become familiar with what it felt like to have another’s mental presence in the same space as his own. That sensation was likely to be the only warning he would have before an attack.

Once he had become used to it, Marin had withdrawn and then she had, with one brutal shove, shattered his wall to pieces.

He had come back to himself only seconds later, although it felt like longer, to find that he was trembling with effort, his fingers clenched and clawing at the ground, and his mind feeling raw and defenceless.

The kid hadn’t liked that one bit and it had taken some reassurance on both their parts that his father wasn’t really being hurt.

“That,” Marin had said, “is what you are learning to defend against.”

She had let him take a break, a moment to catch his breath and swallow down the emotions that had come with the invasion of his mind and had worked with the kid for a while. The child had taken to it all very quickly and Marin had been able to share with him a little more of who his son was and how he experienced the world.

Although she had worked with the child every morning for the last five days, it was him that she spent the most time with and, since that first attack on his shielding, she had put him through his paces for hours each day, pushing him to his limit and then beyond until he was sure that his mind couldn’t stand it again, and then once more after that.

They had worked on speed, on strength, and then, now, on the final lesson of endurance.

Marin prodded, poked, shoved, and the wall held.

She threw an attack at it like a spear and it cracked. He shook with effort but he forced himself to hold his focus, patched the wall. When the next push came, targeted on that weak spot he let everything narrow down to holding it closed, let that unnatural calm he sometimes felt take hold of him. It felt like it went on forever and then, to his surprise, her presence vanished entirely.

He didn’t let it distract him, instead he braced, ready for the next attack.

It never came.

“Good,” Marin said and it sounded distant in his ears.

Slowly, he drew back into himself and the world bled in. The wall dropped in increments until he opened his eyes and found Marin knelt across from him, smiling. He unclenched his fingers from where they had been gripping the mat and winced at the ache. His throat was parched.

Marin unfurled herself and reached for the cups laid aside in anticipation and he took one from her gratefully, fumbling a little with the straw and savouring the fresh water as though it were the nectar of life itself.

Marin looked him up and down with that strange expression but it cleared after a moment and she nodded firmly. “You are ready.”

“I am?” he asked.

The question blurted out without his permission. He didn’t feel ready, far from it, rather he felt more like he had just run a marathon and then gone a few bouts with Cara Dune.

“I could teach you more,” Marin said, “but what you already know will be enough to deter all but the most determined. You held out for more than three minutes on that last attempt.”

Din stared at her. That couldn’t be right. He’d barely managed more than one minute before.

He opened and closed his mouth a few times and then finally settled on, “it didn’t feel like three minutes.”

With the cup empty and discarded, Marin reached out for him. She had always taken care to make sure she hadn’t inadvertently caused any damage so he let her take hold of his gloved hands and did his best to still his mind one final time.

The moment his felt a presence brush against his, he instinctually began to build up the shield and had to force himself to stop, pulling the barriers back down. He felt his cheeks flushing. He hadn’t even thought about it, he’d just done it.

“That,” Marin’s voice rang soft, with just a hint of amusement, “is also why you are ready.”

The heat continued to burn, but when Marin reached again, he let her in, let her sooth the ragged edges of his consciousness. He’d been hesitant to let her do that at first as well until he’d lived with the sensation for a few hours and it had grown unbearable.

She withdrew as gently as she had arrived and he looked up to find her watching him with a sharp gaze.

“Thank you,” he said.

Marin accepted his words with grace and she unfolded herself from her mat.

“Rest, Mandalorian,” she said, indicating the kitchen in open invitation. “I will work with your son for a little while. You are welcome to join us when you are ready.”

He turned his head and followed her path to the door, feeling something rise up in his chest that would not be quashed.

“It’s Din,” he offered. “Din Djarin.”

In the doorway Marin paused and it was only by the tilt to her montrals that he knew she had turned back slightly towards him.

She nodded once, and then she was gone.

He was halfway through his lunch that afternoon when he felt it.

The shield was thrown up without thought but he quickly realised that whatever he had felt was neither Marin, nor any of the other D’ai in the village. It wasn’t some kind of test, but something else entirely.

Cautiously, he let a few of the layers of the wall down, soup forgotten.

Whatever it was, it hovered at the edge of his perception, but it wasn’t fluctuating or moving in a way that suggested consciousness. It didn’t feel like an intrusion. If he had to describe it, he might call it an invitation.

And it was coming from somewhere nearby. How he knew, he didn’t know. Just like he knew that he was supposed to answer that call.

He reached for his helmet and followed it.

On the edge of the settlement was a cave.

He had noticed it when he first arrived because the people here were not afraid of the environment of their home and yet, whilst every other part of the land had clearly been explored and put to use, the cave remained untouched, avoided, almost.

He stood by the entrance of the cave and knew without a doubt that this was where the strange presence was emanating from.

He had known that it was only a matter of time before one of the D’ai noticed him and, unfortunately, he didn’t decide quickly enough. He heard familiar footsteps approaching as Marin came up behind him and, judging by the cooing sound, the _ad’ika_ was with her.

For a moment they simply stood together and looked into the cave. Marin was waiting him out and part of him hated her for it.

“What is this place?” he finally asked.

“This is one of the few remaining locations in the known systems where kyber crystals naturally grow,” she said after a moment.

To her, that clearly meant something. To him, it was clear as mud. “Kyber crystals?”

She looked at him, that odd glint back in her eyes. In her arms, the child chirped, staring into the cave with apparent interest.

“I can show you, if you would like,” she said, head tilting towards the entrance.

He considered it for a moment, still aware of the heaviness hovering on the periphery of his mind. It didn’t feel dangerous and if it were, Marin would not have brought the child. He trusted her enough to know that she wouldn’t risk the child.

The call felt louder here.

“I would.”

Marin readjusted the kid in her arms, letting him free a limb so that he could curl his claws around the mythosaur pendant, and then she walked into the cave without a second thought. With much more careful steps, he followed her into the darkness.

Once the light became faint enough that he couldn’t really see where he was going, he reached up and flicked his headlamp on. It illuminated Marin a few steps ahead, waiting for him and, ahead of her, the first signs of crystalline growth.

“Kyber crystals are what power the sabers,” she explained, leading him further into the cave towards the crystals. The child was looking around with wide eyes. “And they are attuned to the Force.”

He hesitated, on the cusp of taking another step, fighting a battle against engrained prejudices. Then he thought of his son, and of the kindness of the D’ai, and the call drawing him closer.

_Safe._

He didn’t know where the thought came from, but it was enough to push him into taking that decisive step and once he had taken one, it was easier to take the next.

The cave opened out into a larger cavern and he began to see how they had managed to make so many saberstaffs. There were crystals everywhere, faintly glowing in the shadows.

It was oddly beautiful.

Whatever questions he might have had, they were forgotten in the face of his awe and the peace that this place was radiating. Even the child had calmed down and was happily watching the crystals glowing from Marin’s arms, but making no move to go anywhere.

Something flickered in the shadows and his head snapped to look at it. He thought he caught a glimpse of a figure, small, like a child. Flowing red fabric.

“Din?” Marin asked.

“I thought I saw something.”

“Did you?” She was looking at him oddly again. He didn’t like it. “High concentrations of kyber have been known to have unusual effects,” she continued.

“Like hallucinations?”

“Not hallucinations, but visions, yes,” she said. “What did you see?”

Her easy acceptance of his words was encouraging even if the entire situation was putting him firmly on edge.

“I thought I saw, myself.”

It wasn’t what he had meant to say, but he suspected it was true nevertheless.

“As you are?”

“As a child.”

There was movement in the corner of his eye.

“You see it now.”

“Yes.” There was no point denying it.

“Follow it.”

“What?” He couldn’t stop his voice from rising in alarm at the thought.

“You heard me.” Marin sounded solid, firm, like beskar, like she wouldn’t be moved. “The kyber protects itself from those that mean harm. Nothing can hurt you here unless you let it. If the kyber is leading you somewhere, it might be worth finding out what it wants to show you. Visions seen here have been known to come true.”

Din hesitated still. He didn’t like the idea of going into the unknown, but the call was still there, and he felt ignoring it would be worse than following it.

“You’ll look after the kid?” he asked, just in case.

“With my life,” Marin replied and he could hear the truth in the words. “Follow it.”

So he did.

Later, Din would struggle to recall his time in that cave clearly.

It was like a fever dream, slipping from his grasp whenever he tried to recall it too closely.

He remembered following a ghostly figure, a child, himself. Hearing noises of battle, feeling his chest tighten with fear at the sound of droids firing, the screams of his parents as they made their last stand.

He remembered seeing a strange weapon, like a vibroblade but much larger. A sword of light, only it wasn’t light. The blade was a void of darkness, sucking everything in. It felt familiar in a way he couldn’t place.

He remembered the child, looking up at him and calling him _buir_.

Somehow, he made it back to the main cave and found Marin waiting for him with the child, unharmed as promised.

It wasn’t until they had emerged into the sunlight that he realised he was clutching two crystals tightly in his hand.

Marin asked to see them and he let her, confused and disorientated by whatever it was that he had just experienced. She turned them over in his palm, humming lightly as they were revealed, and she seemed to be satisfied with them. When she drew back he noticed that they were no longer glowing white like the other crystals in the cave, but were instead a faint golden yellow.

He tried to give them to her, but she refused.

“They called to you,” she said, “and therefore they belong to you. I cannot take them.” She handed the _ad’ika_ over to him, and he burbled excitedly when he spotted them. “Take them. Go home and rest. This can wait until the morning.”

He woke to the knock at the door.

“Mister Mandalorian?” He recognised the voice as Jett, one of the older children. “Marin is asking for you.”

Beside him the kid made a happy noise and tried to put a tool it his mouth. With reflexes honed by nearly a year of dealing with a toddler, he caught hold of the claw just before the kid could eat anything he shouldn’t.

He felt the _ad’ika_ brush against his mind and he did his best to project a stern tone, an admonishment, but also a greeting.

He didn’t know how successful he was but the kid let him take the tool with minimal complaints and he felt a sudden rush of affection and excitement that wasn’t his own. He smiled and picked up his son, cradling him in one arm as he reached for his helmet.

“I’ll be with her shortly,” he informed Jett and listened to the retreating footsteps.

“Boo?” the child asked.

“I don’t know what she wants,” Din replied, gathering up a chew toy for the kid and a blanket and was about to head to the door when he felt another brush, this time accompanied by determination.

“Baa!” The kid was reaching out towards the crystals on the table.

Din eyed them warily, remembering what had happened the last time he took hold of them.

“Da!” His son was looking up at him now, frowning. He wondered what they felt like to him. Marin had said the crystals had something to do with the Force. Maybe they’d keep the kid entertained.

“Alright,” he said, “point made. I’ll bring them too.”

Before he could overthink it, he scooped them up and dropped them into the bag.

When he found her, Marin was just starting a lesson. As he looked around, he saw students with pieces of metal shaped like saber components and tools laid out in front of them, and he knew why Marin had asked for him.

There was one free space.

Feeling uncomfortable and awkward, he sat at the back of the group in front of the final, unclaimed set of pieces, and settled the child in his lap.

Over the next hour, he learnt an awful lot about the construction of different types of saber, maintenance and care, and weapon safety. It was almost like being back with his original clan, the ones that had saved him. He had grown up in a fighting corps, so this was the sort of lesson he could take in with ease, like muscle memory. He found himself relaxing into it and the awkwardness faded away as those around him struggled where he did not.

“It is time to insert the crystal,” Marin said from the front, demonstrating on her own weapon.

Din looked down, but found that was no crystal in the pack provided. He looked around and saw that the rest of the group were reaching into pockets and their own bags, digging out kyber. In his lap, the kid reached for the bag where the two crystals he had found were stored.

At the front, Marin watched and raised an eyebrow, her intent clear.

Catching hold of the child before he could put one of the crystals in his mouth, Din took hold of one and very, very carefully fixed it into place.

Marin went around and checked each saber, making corrections and amendments as she went until finally she was stood in front of him. He held out the saber he had made, single bladed and with a hilt like a beskad sword. She checked it over, ignited the blade which glowed golden yellow in the sunlight, but unlike the others, she didn’t make any changes before she turned it off and handed it back. He hadn’t expected her to hand it back. He had expected her to keep it, to give it to one of the children, paying it forward in the same way he had sponsored the foundlings at the covert.

“Good work,” she said and the kid screeched happily.

Din held the saber loosely, bewildered, as she walked away.

The following day, Din finally reached the end of his tether. Staying in one place for any period of time was a risk and although he was well aware that the D’ai could defend themselves, he didn’t want to repay their kindness by bringing violence upon their village.

Besides, they had both been getting twitchy yesterday, fuelled by a life on the move, it was hard to learn to stay still.

He gathered their things together, left the saber on the bed for Marin to collect for the children. Once he was certain that he’d dug the final lost toy out from underneath the furniture, he slipped the child into his sling. He’d come to recognise the child’s mental presence and right now he was radiating contentment, still in that phase between sleep and wakefulness.

He hoped to get back the ship before his son woke properly and got ideas about playing with the other children.

As he headed for the gate and the Razor Crest, he found that many people stopped to wish them well on their travels. He hadn’t truly understood how quickly they had settled in here until he was faced with the sheer number of D’ai that he could recognise by name.

Finally, with the child beginning to fuss, he managed to leave the boundary of the village, hoping for a quiet exit and for a minute he thought he’d managed it, but then he entered the clearing with the ship was docked.

Marin was waiting by the Crest.

“You left something behind,” she called.

In her hands was the saber he had built.

“I can’t take this,” he said, slowing in his approach, only a few steps away from her and the ramp.

“Why not?” she asked.

“It belongs with your school,” he said and then, “and I am not D’ai.”

“No,” she agreed easily. Too easily. “But you chose the kyber, did you not?”

“Well, yes, but -"

“And you built it?”

“With your help,” he protested. He could barely get a word in edgeways, Marin wasn’t letting him. She offered the saber out to him again.

“Then it is yours.” She must have seen the protest building in his mind because she followed that up with the one thing she knew he couldn’t refuse. “Take it. If not for yourself, then for your little one, when he’s older.”

Damn her.

Din took it, slipping it onto his belt where it rested against the pouch holding the second crystal. That, the kid hadn’t let him leave behind.

Marin, content in her victory, stepped aside and gestured toward the bags by the ramp.

“I brought a few supplies for you. Some real food for one.” The mischief was back and Din found himself lightening in the face of it. “Take care of yourselves out there.”

“Thank you Marin,” he said, knowing he could never repay her for the hospitality and aid she had given them. He had found a friend in her that he had not expected. 

She rested one hand on his shoulder, finger running lightly over the pauldron and he knew the move was, in its own way, a goodbye.

“There is a gift in you, Din,” she said finally. “I hope that one day, you will see it.” Her hand reached out and brushed across his son’s ear. “Safe travels Clan Djarin.”

**_End of Part 1_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo... this now has two parts. Prepare for much more action and excitement ahead!  
> Thanks again for your support and love for this little AU!


	7. II. The Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ten months on the run is enough to wear anyone down, even Din Djarin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so Part 2 begins....

A life on the run was no life for a child, Din was exquisitely aware of this.

If he had a choice, he would have settled down, found the covert and raised his _ad’ika_ there, but he didn’t have a choice, the Imps had made sure of that. Instead, he was trying his best to give his son as stable and comfortable life as he could, making frequent stops so the kid could stretch his legs and play with other children, taking quick jobs that he could complete whilst the child napped.

It was a hard life, and far from a financially secure one. They had managed so far even with a fairly steady stream of non-Guild hunters on their tail, but Din still had no intel on the one pulling the strings. Even he was beginning to feel the strain and the stress, the lack of rest wearing him down, the need to be hyper-aware of his surroundings at all times making him jumpy and much-needed sleep harder to attain.

He would have gone to the Armourer, or even to Marin, if he wasn’t worried about bringing death and destruction with him.

Ten months of this already, nearly to the day since they had left Nova, and no end in sight.

At least Marin’s lessons on shielding had paid off and he’d reached something of an agreement with his son. He was allowed to use his mind powers to catch his attention and tell him about important things and feelings as his intuitive often proved invaluable, but Din had the right to block him out if it became too much.

That was how he’d learnt that his son had begun referring to himself as _ad’ika_.

It had been the final push he had needed to give the child a name. He had held out in the hopes that the child already had a name and had simply had no way to communicate it, but apparently not. Din would be the first to admit that he didn’t know a thing about naming children so he had fallen back on the one thing he did know – Mando’a.

He had considered _mirshko,_ courage, and _ka’ra_ after the stars that so enraptured the child in hyperspace before he’d remembered that one of the meanings of _riye_ was ‘good turn’, which seemed a pretty fitting description for the change the child had brought about in his life and for the change he hoped his son would bring to many others.

It had taken a little while to convince his son that _ad’ika_ was more a term of affection, but eventually the child had accepted the name and claimed it as his own.

He had hoped that Vlemoth Port would provide a good place to stop for a while. He had heard rumours that some Mandalorians had settled there during the Clone Wars and hoped that they might be willing to share some supplies.

Before he had a chance to find out, something else found them.

An ordinary person wouldn’t have noticed the two men supposedly browsing the stalls in the main port market.

Din Djarin was not an ordinary man.

For one, he was a Mandalorian, a trained warrior and part of a famed and well known Creed. For another, he had, until recently, been a bounty hunter, and a highly successful one at that. He was also well aware that they were being hunted and had been keeping his senses on high alert whenever they were near other people.

He had picked up on their new tail about thirty seconds after they had started following them.

Even if he hadn’t, when he stopped at the next stall offering fresh food Riye whined quietly and he felt a brush against his mind that spoke of uncertainty and urgency.

“I know,” he said quietly so that the words were hidden to all but his son, brushed a finger over an ear in comfort, “I saw them too.”

Handing over the credits, Din tucked the rations away into a pocket and used a move to adjust his bag and cloak as cover for a quick check of exits, alleyways and guards in the area, formulating a plan of action. There was a hopeful looking alley between two buildings which was out of the line of sight of the market so Din set off towards it at a quick walk and, once he was certain they were following him, ducked into the alleyway and then back into an alcove, tucked the sling with Riye in behind him and waited for the opportune moment.

Either they were bad at their job or overconfident because they nearly walked past him.

Din slammed into the first guard, relieved him of his sidearm and used it to shoot the other guy. Rather than waste perfectly good blaster charge, he just kept pressure on the first guard’s neck until he slumped and dropped limply to the floor.

Keeping hold of the blaster to cover himself should the unconscious guard suddenly reawaken he quickly and efficiently rummaged through the pockets until he found the tracker that he suspected they were using.

Only the tracker held a surprise. It was short range, planet only and two-way.

Which meant that whoever had issued it was somewhere on Vlemoth with them.

Din considered the tracker for a moment, let Riye look when he squirmed. It was risky, but if everyone involved was as sloppy as those two guards had been then it might be doable. If he could take out the person at the top of this particular chain he might be able to buy them a reprieve so that they could take some time to visit Marin, or Cara, or follow the co-ordinates the Armourer had sent him and help with the re-establishment of the covert.

At the very least they could gain the information they needed to hack the chain codes and throw the hunters off the scent for the time being.

“What do you think?” he asked, more out of habit than in any real expectation of a response. He felt Riye’s burst of _confidence / interest / happiness_ and had to briefly draw back behind his shields to recover. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

Still, he hesitated before committing, well aware of the risks.

If he had to, he decided, he’d run. Even if it felt cowardly. Riye meant more than his pride and it was better to live and fight another day than leave Riye defenceless. Or as defenceless as a Force-sensitive like his son could be.

But, for now, the potential benefits outweighed the risks, so he lifted the tracker, set it so that it was signalling in reverse, and followed it.

The tracker led him to a series of warehouses on the edge of the port.

It wasn’t hard to work out which one contained his target because it was the only one with armed guards hanging around. If they were intending to be inconspicuous then they had missed their mark by miles.

Din chose a spot up high on the roof of one of the shops, with a few credits to the shopkeeper for their silence and settled in to wait.

He watched for a good half hour before making a decision.

All of his scans had shown around ten guards outside in various positions, following rough patrol routes in a way that suggested that they were trained, but trained lazily. They mostly travelled in pairs but the groups were rarely in sight of each other.

Inside was another issue of course, but maybe he could draw them out.

Unstrapping the Amban rifle, he loaded the disruptor rounds and beside him Riye perked up with interest. He wondered whether that was really a good thing considering what he was about to do to these guards or whether Riye was simply attracted by the light flashes and noise. He probably shouldn’t encourage it considering the weapon was technically illegal.

It took him less than a minute to pick off every single guard, and without raising a single alarm.

“I hope you were paying attention to that,” he murmured as he watched to see if anyone inside had become alerted to their compatriot’s fates. “That was a textbook ambush.”

After a few minutes no one had come running so Din put his rifle away and switched to the blaster. He approached carefully, aware that his blaster was low on charge and that the one he had pinched was low too. The door was, hilariously, unlocked.

He pushed it open and caught the first two by surprise.

He heard shouts as the sound of blaster fire alerted the others, but from what he could hear and what the scans had gathered, there were maybe a dozen more at most. The blaster should last long enough to take out twelve.

Quickly ensuring that Riye was tucked behind him and protected, he advanced.

Two guards, three more, room by room he cleared them out. The borrowed blaster died so he switched to his own. One, two, and another around the corner. Four more and only one room left, the large storage room at the back of the warehouse.

It would be the perfect place for them to dig in and ambush him.

Which is why when he pushed open the door, he threw out his one remaining stun grenade first and whilst they were trying to recover from the blinding flash, he shot them one by one with accuracy honed by years of practice. His blaster’s charge drone grew higher in pitch as the battery ran lower and lower but it lasted.

He scanned the room, catching his breath, when suddenly Riye squeaked.

Across the room, just out of sight behind some storage containers, someone starting clapping.

“Well done Mandalorian.” He felt his heart freeze. It couldn’t be. He’d taken down the TIE fighter, no one should have been able to survive that crash. “I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting you to best all of my guards, but I suppose it would be foolish to underestimate a man of your reputation.”

Moff Gideon stepped out from behind the crate.

Din raised the blaster and pulled the trigger, but it died with a whine, battery finally empty. He briefly considered going for one of the downed guard’s weapons, but he didn’t want to risk turning his back.

He could feel Riye projecting fear and he had to put the shield up, ignoring the small frightened noise that Riye made as he did as best as he could. He couldn’t afford to lose focus now and Riye’s fear had already pushed him off balance, adding to his own.

“It’s time we finished this,” Gideon said, slowly stepping forward, “don’t you think, Mandalorian?”

Din eyes followed as Gideon reached for his belt, only he didn’t pull a blaster as he had been anticipating. Instead, he pulled out what looked like a sword hilt.

Then he pushed something and the blade ignited in a horribly familiar way.

Din was thrown back to the cave on Nova, to the visions he had seen there, visions of a blade as black as the night sky cutting through the air with a whistle. In the flesh it looked much more intimidating.

It was a lightsaber, it had to be.

His own blaster was out, the rifle near useless at this range and whilst Din reckoned the beskar might hold up against the weapon based on stories of old battle with the _jetii_ , he didn’t know for certain and he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.

For the first time ever in battle, he reached for his own saber.

He hadn’t used it much since they left Marin and the moon of Nova behind. He’d run drills with it a few times to ensure he didn’t forget the basics of using it, but he hadn’t trained with it properly.

He was regretting that now.

The hilt fit in his palm as it had been made to, perfect for his grip and, with a push of reassurance towards Riye, he ignited it.

The golden yellow glow illuminated the space around him and, only a few metres away, Gideon paused, his arm dropping slightly. He clearly hadn’t been expecting his opponent to have anything capable of standing up against a lightsaber.

“You’re full of surprises,” Gideon said and Din hated the tint of respect in his voice with a passion. He swirled the dark blade in his hand and watching the blade move with an admiring gaze. But he didn’t advance, not yet. “Did you know that the last person to wield this darksaber was a Mandalorian? I pried it from their cold, dead hands.”

The rage that built up inside him was almost instinctual, the insult to his people too much to bear after years of struggle. If it hadn’t been for Riye’s mental shove he might have attacked then and there but instead he seethed, silently and out of sight.

The term darksaber was ringing a bell somewhere in his memory too, but he brushed it aside. All that mattered now was defeating Moff Gideon and ensuring he could never hurt Riye again.

His refusal the take the bait meant that it was Gideon who made the first swing and Din blocked it, although for a moment he hadn’t been sure if a blade made of light was actually going to block anything. If the way the strike jarred his arm and rippled up to his shoulder was any indication, it was more than capable.

Din attacked and they locked blades, swiping and striking with deadly strength.

It quickly became clear that Din was outmatched. He’d been raised in the fighting corps, but his training had focused on firearms and hand to hand. The main blade he had been trained with was a vibroblade dagger. Swords had been considered antiquated and their instruction in their use had only included the basics. Even staffs had received more attention.

Gideon, however, had not been slacking on his sword work. It was clear that he knew how to handle the darksaber and Din found himself on the defensive, focused on blocking incoming attacks, hoping for an opening, and always, always, protecting his back to keep Riye safe.

Another strike came and Din stumbled to parry. The angle was awkward and he barely kept his grip on his saber.

Although he tried to conceal the fumble, Gideon was, like him, a warrior, and he narrowed in on the weakness he had spotted until, inevitably, a few strikes later, the saber was knocked from Din’s hand and flung far away deactivating with a rattle as it hit the ground. The darksaber met his chestplate with a grating screech which pushed him backwards but, judging by the lack of agonising pain or immediate death, the beskar had held.

Lightning-fast, he ran through his options. The saber was out of reach, the rifle still useless this close. He didn’t know if the beskar would hold up again against a clear strike.

But the alternative was losing his son.

Gideon was approaching; he could hear the strange whistling of the blade as it cut through the air, nothing like the comforting hum of his saber. It screamed of violence and bloodshed.

Before he could think of a plan of action, it came whistling down and in a move more instinct than intent he crossed his arms and caught the blade on his vambraces. The force of the strike knocked him to his knees but as the blade slid off the beskar he did he best to push back against it, forcing Gideon to step back so that he had some space.

He gained perhaps a metre. It wasn’t enough. Retreat was his only option.

“Finally,” Gideon said as he scrambled backwards away from the sword, still running through possible actions and still drawing a blank. He pushed Riye behind him when he felt him wriggling. “Give over the Asset,” Gideon said as his back hit the wall and Riye let out a quiet squeak of protest at being blocked in, “and I’ll make sure you have a quick death.”

Din was desperate, and angry, and determined. It felt as though something was building inside of him, something powerful. He would lay down his life before allowing this Imp filth anywhere near his son and if he had to meet his death here then he would meet it with honour, and he’d take his opponent with him if he could.

“Never,” he spat.

“Very well,” Gideon replied and the blade swung down, down.

Din flung out a hand in one last, desperate act of protection and waited for the blow to fall.

It never came.

There was a strange sound and then, far away, a thump.

He opened his eyes and found that Moff Gideon had been thrown clean across the room and was now laid in a crumpled and unmoving heap. The darksaber, as Gideon had called it, lay only a few feet away, deactivated and within reach.

Behind him, he heard the _ad’ika_ shuffle out from behind him and this time he didn’t stop him. His wide eyes flicked between his _buir_ and the seemingly unconscious Imp.

Din exhaled heavily, letting the tension and the mix of emotion drain away. There was only one thing that could have done that, he’d seen similar things done with the Force in Marin’s village on Nova. He didn’t like it when his son used it, that sort of thing could easily give them away and he’d seen how much using it wore Riye out. He didn’t want to think about what might happen if the _ad’ika_ overstretched himself.

“Thanks Riye,” he said, reaching out with a shaky hand to stroke between his son’s ears.

“ _Buir_?” Riye asked, ears tilting. He looked confused for some reason. Maybe he hadn’t intended to do it.

With the loss of the immediate threat, Din took a moment to confirm that his son was physically fine, and then he turned back to Moff Gideon, feeling that righteous anger once again start to burn in his veins.

This man would have taken his son and done horrific things to him.

Gideon had already hurt so many, Mandalorians included. He could stop him from hurting anymore, he had within his grasp the means to end it now.

He stood, scooping up the darksaber as he straightened. It fit neatly in his grip.

“ _Buir_?” he heard Riye distantly, heard the edge of fear and uncertainty in his voice but it was muffled by the growing ringing in his ears.

He took a few steps towards Gideon, ready to ignite the blade and have his vengeance.

It consumed him.

Or rather, it would have, if he hadn’t been stopped by what felt like a hand tugging on his cape and pulling him to a stop and over the sound of his racing heartbeat he could hear something that screamed of approaching danger and feel Riye on the edge of his mind, afraid of, of _something_.

Footsteps, outside, loud footsteps, loud enough that he heard them over the ringing and his breathing and could process what they meant. Lots of footsteps, running.

Shaking himself out of the haze of violence as the urge to protect overcame the urge to hurt once more, he paused and ran a few quick scans. Thermals confirmed that there was what looked to be a full battalion converging on the building, fast, closing off the exits one by one until only the back exit, which was so well concealed it had taken him ten minutes to spot it whilst he had scoped the place out, was left.

He looked over at Gideon’s slumped form, then back at Riye, watching him in a strangely subdued way, and wished desperately that he still had a working blaster on him, or the time to grab one, so he could put a few bolts into Gideon’s head.

But he didn’t, and he didn’t have time anymore.

It went against every instinct and thought in his mind but he turned, tucked the darksaber away, grabbed his own saber in one hand, scooped up Riye in his free arm to the sound of a startled squawk and a quick brush against his mind which he took as a rebuke for the harsh handling, and ran.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for so many lovely comments! <3  
> I hope you enjoy the slight change in gear/pace that is part 2!


	8. II. The Forge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Din returns home to a mixed greeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI, this chapter contains a fair amount of Mando'a. Hopefully, most will make sense in context without translations, but I've included translations on hover and in the end notes!

Din didn’t hang around long enough to find out if Gideon still had hunters after them in Vlemoth Port. He certainly hadn’t made himself less of a target as he was now in possession of not one, but two of Gideon’s prized possessions. Not that Riye was a possession, but he got the distinct feeling that Gideon didn’t see it that way.

Riye was still subdued, and he kept brushing up against his _buir_ ’s mind as though he were checking for something. After what had just happened, Din didn’t have the heart to block him out, so instead he just let his sense of love and protection hover at the forefront of his mind in the hopes that Riye would pick up on it and be reassured.

Having navigated the main port, with a fair bit of haste, he found the Razor Crest safe and sound and only partially relaxed once the door had shut behind them. Instead of taking a moment to put things away and take stock, he headed straight for the cockpit.

He hoped that with Gideon briefly down, they might have a small reprieve, a head start if nothing else, so he finally pulled up the Armourer’s message and logged the co-ordinates into the Crest’s nav system. The covert’s chosen relocation site was so far away he had to double check that they would have enough fuel. They did, but only just.

“Time to go home, Riye,” he said in the hopes of cheering up his still downcast son and, finally, his green ears perked up, though he stayed present at the corner of his mind all the way to Bakura.

Bakura was the home of the largest trading port between the Outer Rim and Wild Space, the planet itself was technically in Wild Space, but the environment was rich and varied and the atmosphere breathable and there were enough small out-of-the-way towns that Din could understand why the covert might have chosen to relocate there. Easy to get supplies, enough people to blend in amongst, enough isolated areas to hide in.

The co-ordinates the Armourer had sent him led him to the edge of the town near a mountainous area of Bakura. He landed the Crest in a small clearing which kept it hidden from view, and with the supplies he thought might be helpful for the covert and Riye in his sling, he picked up his padd to follow the co-ordinates the rest of the way on foot.

The covert had apparently set up outside of one of the smaller towns, close to the nearby mountains. The only indication that anyone lived here at all was the small dirt path that had been worn into the grass by many wandering feet.

If he hadn’t been looking for it he would have walked just past it.

There were many small caves and cave systems along the edge of the mountain range, but the entrance to this one had a small mythosaur carved into the rock above it.

Re-adjusting his grip on his bags and on Riye, he flicked his headlamp on and stepped in.

The first few rooms were empty and dark, but the further in he walked, the more signs of life he started to see and hear. Light ahead that wasn’t from his headlamp, the sound of quiet conversation, the rhythmic clash of hammer against metal.

Home.

His steps quickened as he reached the doorway that opened into the new base of the covert, his heartrate increasing as he realised that more than one voice could be heard.

Was it possible, could it be true?

He stepped through into the first lit area and immediately had a rifle shoved into his face and a large form blocked his way, cutting off most of the light so he was forced to stand in the shadows.

“Identify yourself,” the voice was familiar, painfully so.

“ _Su cuy'gar , vod_,” he said, knowing that the Mando’a greeting was a better identifier than any other.

The rifle lowered and the larger Mandalorian stepped back, not letting him past, but letting the light bleed back in. It illuminated Riye as he fussed in his sling, perhaps sensing something in the atmosphere that was beyond Din’s perception, but he wasn’t trying to warn him of anything, so it couldn’t be a serious threat.

The Mandalorian guard, decked in blue painted armour, looked down at the small sounds Riye was making and then back up at him in recognition. “Djarin.” He spat the word out.

Din had to lock his knees to keep them from buckling in relief. That was Paz Vizla all right.

Paz didn’t look pleased to see him but then Din was pretty sure that Paz had never been pleased to see him. In that moment he couldn’t have cared less what Paz thought of him. It didn’t matter in the face of a much more important revelation.

Paz was alive.

And if Paz was alive then maybe others were alive too and he had not, in fact, been single-handedly responsible for wiping out the covert.

“You’ve got some nerve, showing up here,” Paz said, but he did step aside to allow him to enter.

“You’re –“ Din swallowed around the words and rephrased them. “How many made it?”

“Less than half,” Paz replied shortly, leading him briskly into the main area of the covert without a second glance back. The cold shoulder was uncomfortable, but expected. Paz had always cared deeply about the protection of the covert and Din had forced them to reveal themselves.

The sounds of hammering grew louder.

The forge was almost identical to the one on Nevarro, the layout a mirror of the room he had last seen the Armourer in. He approached the chairs set out slowly, feeling the eyes of those sat around the edge of the room follow him. He watched as the figures straightened, some watching him warily, others, he could tell by their stances, aggressively.

He could feel the emotions roiling inside of him and had to clench his fists to keep his hands from shaking. Part of him wanted to collapse to his knees in sheer relief that so many had made it out of Nevarro alive, another part of him remembered the pile of helmets, some so small, and he wanted to sink to the ground for entirely different reasons.

The hammering sound stopped as he reached the chair and sank into it.

A moment later, the Armourer sat across from him.

“ _Olarom , _Din Djarin,” she greeted.

“ _Gedeteyar , alor_,” he replied.

“What news?”

Din paused as he tried to parse what he could say publicly and what would be better to say privately. “We have traveller far, evading hunters and Imps, and have slain many. On our last trip we were able to retrieve a weapon taken from a Mandalorian. I am here to return it to the covert, where it belongs.”

The room was filled with hushed whispers as the Armourer observed him for a long moment, reading between the lines and hearing all of the things he hadn’t declared.

“Come,” she said standing and indicating for him follow, “we have much to discuss.”

On trembling legs, he followed, feeling the glares of the covert burning into his back as he went.

As the room to the Armourer’s rooms slid shut behind them, blocking out the rest of the covert, the Armourer settled herself down opposite him and waited patiently for him to speak.

Riye toddled across the room, exploring the new space with interest.

“Much has changed,” he started. “I have not found his people, but I have found a place where one once resided. I have also found people with abilities similar to him.”

He felt Riye brush against his mind, trying to catch his attention and he turned to search for his son, finding him holding up a metal, but harmless trinket in his hands, ears twitching with the implied question.

“Yes,” he said, “you can play with that if you want.”

The Armourer straightened sharply across from him. “You can communicate with him?” she asked, tilting her head a little in curiosity.

“Sort of. It’s,” he almost said complicated and settled on, “difficult to explain.”

“Try,” she said in a tone that brooked no refused.

“Marin, the force user that I found, she’s not _jetii _but she’s not _darjetii_ either, she said that it was something to do with the Force. That, because Riye sees me as his father, he’s formed a sort of mental bond with me.” He didn’t need to see the Armourer’s face to know that she was frowning. “Anyway, that’s how we communicate. It’s mainly through feelings rather than words. Although Marin also taught me how to build mental shields, so I can block him out if I need to, or at least block anyone else capable of mental attacks.”

The Armourer was silent as she digested this information. “And you trust this Marin?”

“Yes,” he said, with a speed and conviction that caught him off guard.

The Armourer nodded and, just like that, the matter was settled and they could move on to other, more pressing issues, like the real reasons he had returned to the covert.

“You wished to show me something?”

Din figured it would be better to just show his _alor_ , rather than fumble through another broken explanation, so he reached for his bag and drew out the wrapped darksaber hilt and laid it on the small table.

As he flipped the cover aside for the first time in his life he heard the Armourer gasp in shock, or perhaps surprise, and he wondered what it was exactly that he had found.

She reached out towards the hilt with a caution that he would never normally associate with her. Her fingers brushed against the metal and he sensed something, perhaps relief, perhaps benediction. He let her take her time, knowing that this moment was important in ways he couldn’t understand.

Eventually, fingers still mapping out the hilt, the Armourer looked up at him.

“Do you know what you have found Din Djarin?”

“No,” he admitted.

“This is the darksaber,” the Armourer explained, finally pulling back. Recognition rung in his head again. “It was made by the first Mandalorian _jetii_ , Tarre Vizsla and it has become an heirloom of our people.” Din nodded, brain catching on several things, not least of which that there had been a Mandalorian Jedi, and that Paz might be related to them in some way.

“The darksaber,” the Armourer continued, “was the symbol the _Mand’alor_ and it killed many Jedi. It was lost in the civil war, last wielded by Bo-Katan.”

Din had to hold back his own gasp. This had been the weapon of the _Mand’alor_? The leader of Mandalore and of its people?

“What,” his throat felt dry, “what does this mean?”

“Did you gain it through combat?” the Armourer asked.

“Yes.”

“Then,” the Armourer reached for the hilt and lifted it, offering it to him, “by right, it belongs to you.” Reluctantly, Din reached out to take it. “Along with the title of _Mand’alor_.”

He stopped, fingers inches away and sharply withdrew his hand.

“I can’t,” he said as everything in him rebelled at the idea, “I, I’m not a leader. I can’t, I can’t take that on. Not now, not with Riye. I’m not suited.”

The Armourer lowered the darksaber back to the table and considered him.

“Then what would you have done with it?”

Din looked at her, his _alor_ , so calm and steadfast and the one true rock in his life, and he knew.

“Take it,” he said. “It’s yours.”

Now it was the Armourer’s turn to protest. “I cannot rightfully claim this. The weapon would be of more use in your hands, to protect Riye.” Her tone of voice suggested that she thought this settled the argument but still, he didn’t reach for the darksaber.

Instead, Din swallowed down his nervousness, and reached for his belt, where his own saber was hooked.

“About that,” he said.

With the darksaber safely stored with the Armourer, for safekeeping only as she had insisted, Din spent the next two days skirting the edges of the covert, well aware by now from the whispers and looks what most of the covert thought of him. It wasn’t kind, but in way he thought it was deserved.

In particular, he was avoiding Paz, because he knew that any confrontation with the covert’s main protector was not going to be easy, or quiet, but he also knew he couldn’t avoid him forever, and after two days of being shunned by all but the Armourer and Riye, he would happily take Paz’s anger over the passive loathing, dismissal and evasion that had been grating on him.

Ever since he had adopted the child, Din had become increasingly adept at non-violent forms of negotiation and conflict resolution.

But he suspected these tactics would not work on Paz so before he left his room he made sure to warm up and hoped that he wasn’t about to have his face rearranged for him. Or rather, something approximating it, that was, after all, what helmets were for.

He didn’t need to ask to find out where Paz was waiting, he could hear the sounds of someone taking out there frustrations on a punching bag from halfway across the base. A couple of Mandalorians were looking towards the sound with some confusion and he spotted Aikan and Evelynn amongst the crowd, but when they spotted him approaching, they fell quiet and parted, their stares boring into the back of his head.

He wondered how many of them actually blamed him for what had happened to the covert on Nevarro and how many were just following the mood of the covert.

As he entered the room, Paz struck the bag with such force that the piton holding it to the ceiling came loose and dropped the sack to the floor.

“Paz,” he said, hoping to end this quickly.

Paz took a deep breath, his shoulders rising and falling with the strength of it.

“Djarin.” The word sounded as though it had been spat between gritted teeth. “Finally come to face me, _hut'uun_?”

All hopes of a peaceful resolution flew out of the window. Any other insult Din could have allowed to pass, but to be called a coward? That, he couldn’t stand for.

He didn’t even bothered responding verbally, he went straight in for a punch and Paz returned in kind and just like that they were locked in a fight which easily had the potential to become deadly. Din was already at a disadvantage, his strengths more in stealth and speed than brute strength, so he had to make every hit count.

He landed a few, enough to put Paz briefly on the defensive, but whatever rage was fuelling his clan mate was enough for Paz to break through and deliver a blow to his head that made the world briefly spin and his ears ring with the force of it as he stumbled backwards. Usually, in practice bouts, the neck and head were out of bounds. If he had needed any further proof that Paz was treating this as real combat with an enemy, that punch was it.

He darted away from the next few blows, relying on instinct and his knowledge of Paz’s fighting style whilst the world righted itself and then he threw himself back into the fight to the gasps and murmurs of the growing group of onlookers.

Several times, Din’s hand twitched towards his saber and each time he forced himself away. He had to win this, and he had to win it honourably if he wanted a chance to ever be welcome here again.

Paz got a solid hit in and Din doubled over as his solar plexus spasmed and, rather than straighten, he absorbed the hit and dropped to the floor, avoiding Paz’s follow up strike. He kicked out towards Paz’s legs, directing all his strength into the movement, and managed to knock him off balance enough that he fell to one knee.

Before his opponent could recover, Din had scrambled up and spun round him, hooking an arm around his neck, catching and twisting one of Paz’s arms behind him with the other and putting pressure with a knee in his back, moving with a speed that surprised even him.

But that didn’t matter, what mattered was that Paz now had little choice but to yield, he just had to wait him out.

“Enough!” The Armourer’s voice rang through the cavern and the room immediately stilled.

Din let go of Paz and backed away, feeling blood trickling from his nose and, if he turned his head too quickly, the world spun at the edges.

“What is going on here?”

She did not sound impressed.

“Half the covert is dead because of him,” Paz shouted, scrambling up now that he was free, still caught up in the emotion of the fight. He made a violent gesture in his direction. “I’m giving him what he deserves, the _aruetii_.”

He seemed to realise a moment too late who he was speaking to but the damage had been done. The Armourer stiffened and straightened herself to her full height.

“Half of the covert died in the protection of a Foundling, Paz Vizla,” she said, voice cold and ringing with finality. “Din Djarin has continued to protect that Foundling against considerable odds. He has followed the _Resol'nare_ without fail. What befell us,” the Armourer looked around at the room to make it clear that her next words were now addressed to everyone, “was tragic, but the alternative was to stand back and let one of our own die, to let a Foundling die. It is our duty as Mandalorians to defend our family, no matter the cost. This is the Way.”

Around him, Din heard faint mumbles as the crowd quietly echoed their _alor_ , suitably chastised for turning on their own.

Beside him, Paz sighed and deflated and Din heard him mutter his own, “this is the Way.”

As the room began to empty, the Armourer approached them and Din did his best to stand straight despite of the bruises blossoming across his body.

“Paz, you will apologise for your insult,” the Armourer said simply, “and then you will answer to me. Djarin,” her attention turned on him and he felt as though he were a child again, brought before his instructors to face up to whatever had got him in trouble, “I expected better of you.”

Her words stung, almost as much as Paz’s insults.

He swallowed down the urge to inform her about what Paz had said to him to spark the fight. He was many things, but he’d never been a snitch and he wasn’t going to start now. They were no longer children, they could resolve this like adults.

The Armourer crossed her arms and waited until Paz turned to him and apologised.

“ _N'eparavu takisit_ ,” Paz said and it actually sounded sincere.

Din nodded once to show that he had accepted it.

“Are either of your injured?” the Armourer asked.

“No,” Paz replied, still subdued in the wake of her words.

Din hesitated as he tried to judge whether any of his injuries were severe enough to require medical attention and apparently his hesitation was taken as confirmation because the Armourer ordered him to report to the med bay immediately as she turned and led Paz away.

He considered going to his room instead, but then he remembered what had happened the last time he had suffered a head injury and decided it was better to be safe than sorry.

Whilst he sat there and let Aikan prod and poke him until he was fixed to her satisfaction, he reached out to Riye and did his best to project reassurance and calm. He’d had his shield up during the fight to protect him from the cocktail of unpleasantness. Aikan announced that he was good to go, but she caught his arm before he could leave.

“Din, I’m sorry,” she said, “about the way the covert has been treating you - for the way I’ve treated you. It wasn’t your fault. I, I’m sorry.”

Din looked at her. Aikan was one of the few members of the covert that he had always been friendly with, if not familiar and whilst she’d been a bit distant from him since his return, she certainly hadn’t been outwardly unpleasant, so the apology caught him a little by surprise.

“It’s alright,” he said, because as far as he was concerned, it was. “Consider it forgotten.”

For the next two days, live in the covert eased into something approaching comfortable. Din knew that he hadn’t been forgiven by everyone, but they had at least stopped outwardly expressing their distaste for him. Several people, Aikan included, took opportunities to invite him to join them to play _cu'bikad_ , or to contribute to conversations.

Riye, on the other hand, everyone seemed to adore and whenever he turned, Din found another member of the covert playing with him, or trying to teach him another word in Mando’a. The other Foundlings were particularly smitten and several times when he’d been talking with Aikan, or trying to feed Riye without making a mess everywhere, they had run up and asked to play with him.

Din knew, the longer they stayed the harder it would be to leave. And they would have to leave, soon.

With each passing day, there was a chance that Moff Gideon was closing in and he could not, would not, risk the covert’s safety.

So the following morning, he packed their things, including the new toys that various members of the covert had gifted Riye and managed to get Riye securely in his arms before his son could work out where they were going.

It was a good thing too, because he was not impressed and Din had to throw up a shield to block out the emotions of an upset and grumpy toddler who couldn’t understand why they had to go. He was worried that Riye might try something with the Force, so he did his best stern father impression and thankfully he settled before they reached the Razor Crest.

He was just putting away the last of their things when he heard footsteps approaching and he whirled around, blaster out.

But it was only the Armourer.

“You are leaving?” the Armourer asked as she reached the top of the ramp and looked around the inside of the Crest.

“I can’t stay,” Din said, “I can’t risk bringing further danger here.”

“If this is to do with what Paz said,” the Armourer began but Din cut her off with a raised hand.

“It’s not,” he said, even though it was in part. “Moff Gideon is still alive, and I’ve taken two things he values highly, if he isn’t already, he’ll be hunting us again and I won’t bring that upon you, not again.”

The Armourer looked reluctant, but she rested her hand on his shoulder briefly. “You cannot face this alone Din,” she said.

“I know,” he replied. “Don’t worry, I won’t be alone.” He thought of Cara and Greef on Nevarro, of Omera and her sharp shooting, and of Marin and her fellow village leaders. “I’ve got a few favours to call in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mando'a translations:  
> su cuy'gar - hello (literally, you're still alive - quite fitting here!)  
> vod - brother/sister/comrade  
> olarom - welcome  
> gedeteyar - thank you (to be thankful)  
> alor - leader/chief  
> darjetii - Mandalorian word for Sith  
> Mand'alor - sole leader  
> hut'uun - coward (worst possible insult in Mando'a)  
> aruetii - traitor/outsider  
> Resol'nare - six actions (the six tenets of Mandalorian life, education and armor, self-defense, our tribe, our language, our leader—all help us survive)  
> n'eparavu takisit - sorry (literally, I eat my insult)  
> cu'bikad - an indoor game that involves stabbing blades into a chequered board, imagine a mix of darts, chess and ludo


	9. II. The Ruin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are not many places that could make Din nervous, but Coruscant was one of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies that this is a day late, but that's what I get for committing to this update schedule and then going on a weekend away!

Ever since the fight with Gideon at Vlemoth, Din had been chasing rumours.

Whilst Gideon was never going to be anything other than a dangerous opponent, he had hoped that in the wake of the decimation of his forces and the loss of the darksaber that Gideon would be more vulnerable than normal, more prone to mistakes. There might be a chance, however small, of getting this particular problem off their backs for good.

The recent rumours, in a round-about kind of a way, led him back to Navarro and to Cara, because he suspected that his next destination was the sort of place where back up would be a sensible idea.

There are not many places that could make Din nervous, but Coruscant was one of them.

In any other circumstances, he would have avoided the planet and he would admit that he had been erring over his decision even as he talked Cara into coming with him. He had only popped into the cantina to have a brief catch up with Greef and to get a bit of insider knowledge of the Guild gossip. He hadn’t been intending to pick up a job, even though he was low on credits, but the puck and tracker that Greef was now sliding across the table toward him were the final pieces in a perfect storm of motivation. As he picked up the puck, he listed the reasons in his head in an attempt to convince himself that this was a good idea.

One, Yoda’s book had mentioned a Jedi temple on Coruscant so this was a good opportunity to find out about both Riye’s species and his abilities. Two, there were rumours of Imps sniffing around on the planet who had connections to Moff Gideon and if they could get a location on Gideon they could plan an assault to remove a serious threat. Three, a very high paying bounty was on Coruscant and they were low on both money and supplies, any extras could be sent to support the covert. Four, Cara, whilst sober at that, had agreed to come along so he’d have someone he trusted to watch his back.

The puck felt heavier than normal as it slid into his pocket, and it wasn’t just with the weight of the coin it promised.

“I know it’s not your normal type of bounty, core world and all that,” Greef said in apology, “but you’re the only one I trust to actually pull it off, especially if Cara’s going with you.”

“I appreciate that,” Din replied in acceptance of the sideways compliment.

“You don’t like it though, I can tell,” Greef said. “You’ve gone all tense. Don’t like Coruscant?”

“Don’t like the number of people,” Din said. He had nothing against the planet itself, just the number of potential problems on it, and the number of eyes on Riye. “More opportunities for trouble.”

“Fair enough,” Greef said and glanced over at where Cara was supervising Riye’s breakfast, which basically meant ensuring more of the soup went in his mouth than on his clothes. It was much harder than people usually expected. Din followed his gaze, but Cara seemed to be handling it pretty well.

Riye had surprised Cara by greeting her by name, which had immediately endeared the baby to her and she’d happily taking him off his hands. Din would never admit that he’d spent two days getting Riye to say it properly, but it had been worth it.

“How’s the little one?”

“Fine,” Din said shortly, then remembered that he was talking to someone who probably qualified as a friend and added, “a lot of work.”

“Keeping you on your toes?”

“He keeps trying to get into the weapons locker,” he admitted wryly.

“Takes after his father then,” Greef said with a smile. Din swallowed back the rush of emotion that accompanied being addressed as Riye’s father. He still wasn’t quite used to it, but he didn’t dislike it.

“I’d rather he waited until he was old enough to understand firearm safety.”

They watched as Riye finished the mug of soup and Cara attempted to wipe the worst of it off his face. Din felt himself softening at the sight, but it also signalled that it was time to head off. They were on the clock, after all.

As he stood to leave, Greef caught hold of his arm.

“If you need any help getting the Imps off your back in future, you know where to find me.”

The offer was unexpected considering how rarely Greef Karga took sides, but he was willing to take any help he could get at this point and he reckoned that this particular offer was genuine. Even without the darksaber and his guards from Vlemoth, Gideon was a fearsome opponent with the resources and men to put up a considerable defence. Getting to him would be difficult.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said and Greef let go, turning the movement into a wave at Riye, who was now held in Cara’s arms. Riye, clearly remembering the waving incident from the time they were avoiding Gideon’s TIE fighter cheerfully waved back.

“All good?” Cara asked as he approached, holding out Riye for him to take.

“As close as it’s going to get,” Din said.

Between them, Riye settled into the sling and dug out the mythosaur pendant which, despite Din’s efforts to the contrary, still seemed to be his favourite chew toy.

“Right then,” Cara said, hefting up her bag and looking glad to finally be putting the cantina and indeed the whole of Navarro behind her, “hurry up, I want to see how you’re getting on with your word list.”

Din watched her from a few paces behind, torn between sighing in exasperation at her antics and smiling at her care. He eventually settled on the latter.

When Din had been adopted into the Mandalorian covert and had taken his lessons with the fighting corps, one of his instructors had described Coruscant as one massive, planet-sized city. As a teenager, Din had struggled to imagine what that might look like.

Since then, he’d been to Coruscant twice and could vouch for the accuracy of his instructor’s description. The first time he’d stopped for fuel and had learnt a valuable lesson on haggling and core world prices, the second he’d been chasing a bounty that, in retrospect, he really wasn’t experienced enough to handle and he’d only made it off the planet alive by the skin of his teeth.

He didn’t really have many positive associations with Coruscant. To his surprise, neither did Cara.

“Coruscant was the heart of the Empire, the place they rose to power,” Cara said. “Of course I don’t like it. People here are responsible for the destruction of my planet.”

Right, Din thought, he hadn’t really considered it that way.

“You didn’t have to come along,” he offered.

Beside him, Cara relaxed slightly and scoffed. “Don’t be stupid. I couldn’t leave you to sort this one out alone. Flashy armour like yours? You’re going to stand out like a sore thumb, who knows what sort of trouble you’ll get.”

In fact, blending in when he needed to was generally not one of his weak points even with the armour, but he appreciated the sentiment and the words Cara was leaving unsaid.

“I’ve missed you too, Cara,” he said, just to see the look of surprise on her face.

He began to input the landing sequence before the moment could become too awkward, heading for one of the quieter ports, if quiet was the right word to use on Coruscant. They knew that the Razor Crest would stand out simply because of its age and design, but Din hoped to be in and out again fairly quickly, certainly no more than a day or two. Hopefully that way they could get away before certain interested parties picked up on their presence and came knocking.

The moment they touched down, the tracker in Din’s pocket started to go off and they both looked down at the offending article in confusion.

“He’s really that close?” Cara asked. “What are the odds?”

“No idea,” Din replied and he finished the shutdown sequence and checking that Riye had all of this things.

Greef had been able to give him a general area but, even so, there were an almost dizzying number of ports to choose from, and that was just on the upper levels. He hadn’t really thought too much about where to land, he’d just picked whichever port had felt right.

He wondered if this was the sort of thing that Jedi used to be able to do, to use the Force to twist luck onto their side.

“Well,” said Cara looking oddly disappointed at the lack of a chase after months of relative boredom on Navarro, “at least this will be quick, huh?”

Din smiled at her, momentarily forgetting that she couldn’t see it.

They were both tense, something about the planet setting them on edge, but he could at least try and relieve the tension a little before they went outside and had to be hyperaware of everything.

“With the way his luck is going,” he said slowly and with a hint of dark humour, “I suspect that today just isn’t going to be Marcus Voll’s day.”

Cara picked up on his tone of voice and grinned back.

“Get your knives old man,” she teased and he knew, just knew that she was using the word list intentionally (to his shame, dagger had been one of the words his brain no longer accepted) and it warmed something deep inside his chest. “Time to go hunting.”

The streets were fairly crowded, despite the time of day, and Din tucked Riye closer to him instinctually, not wanting to lose his son in the bustle of the district. It was irrational, perhaps, considering that Riye was tucked firmly into his sling, but it made him feel better.

Cara had the tracker and was leading the way whilst Din, with his helmet and all of the scans it was capable of running, stayed a few steps behind and kept an eye out for trouble.

Coruscant, Din would admit, had seen better days. He had heard that the Empire had maintained an iron grip on the planet right up until the Battle of Endor, and then the people of Coruscant had revolted against the Imperials and had mostly ejected them from the city. After the war, however, Coruscant had lost the favour of the New Republic and it had never quite reclaimed its former glory. The people in the streets all looked a little worse for wear as a result, once beautiful clothes now worn and damaged, buildings collapsing, and danger lurking down alleyways where it had once only really existed in the deep levels below.

Up ahead, Cara paused as she checked the tracker and took an abrupt left turn down one of the wider alleyways, Din followed at a distance, his hand hovering over his blaster, but the alley was deserted and it emerged into a large open space, which was dominated by the crumbling ruins of what must once have been an absolutely enormous structure.

The area was noticeably quieter too, emptier, and the people who moved around the outskirts of the building did so quickly and silently, almost as though they were afraid of disturbing ghosts.

Din drew up alongside Cara and together they looked up at the ruins.

“He’s in there,” Cara confirmed aloud, “whatever the fuck that is.”

He noticed that in wake of the sombre reverence in which the structure seemed to be held that Riye had also gone quiet and he glanced down to check on him. He was looking up at the remains of the walls with wide eyes, but he didn’t look afraid and when Din dropped his shields he didn’t pick up on any fear coming from his son, uncertainty yes, curiosity and awe, but not fear.

“What is it, Riye?” he asked.

Two ears swivelled as Riye twisted to look up at him and then he said two words that forced Din to swiftly re-evaluate the situation.

“ _Buir_! ‘edi!”

Beside him Cara startled and leaned in so she could hiss into his ear. “Did he just say _Jedi_?” Din nodded and Cara rocked back on her heels with a whistle.

He looked up at the building and wondered if they, completely by accident, or by sheer blind luck, had found the Jedi Temple that Yoda had talked about in his books. He tried to imagine what the building might have looked like in its heyday, before time and war turned it into ruins. He wasn’t sure what a Jedi Temple even looked like, but he suspected that no matter the architectural design, this building would have made for an intimidating and impressive landmark.

“You don’t think the bounty's one of them, do you?” Cara asked, interrupting his train of thought with a far less pleasant one.

He hadn’t even considered that possibility and his hand twitched away from his blaster and towards his saber. He’d put in some practice time with it and was now fairly confident in his ability to handle it in a fight.

“I really hope not,” he said simple, untucking Riye with his free hand and passing him the Cara, pulling off the sling and shoving it into a pocket. He wanted to have his hands free and the beskar unhindered going into this fight, just in case.

He shared a look with Cara, of mutual reassurance and agreement, and they both straightened, weapons at the ready and Riye held tightly in her grip.

“Only one way to find out,” he said, bracing himself as he ran a scan to find an entrance that was structurally sound enough to be safe. One hand on his blaster, the other on his saber, he led the way into the ruins and the darkness beyond.

The beeping of the tracker, their breathing, their footsteps, and the occasional creak of settling ruins were the only sounds that accompanied their journey into the dark. Every now and again the corridors would open up into rooms or larger spaces and light from outside would bleed through but mostly it was claustrophobic and tense.

Eventually, the beeping picked up, indicating that they were close and Din shut it off before it could alert their quarry. A quick scan revealed that the room beyond was vast and for the most part unlikely to fall down on them.

There was also a single heat signature.

Din raised a hand and with a series of signals gave Cara the basic information she needed. Behind him, he heard the whine of a blaster powering up and then a tap on his back to let him know that she was ready.

He worked his gloves between the small crack in the door and pushed it open. Whatever mechanism the door had worked on, it was intact enough that it slid open soundlessly.

Pulling his blaster from his belt, he advanced towards the heat signature.

The room was indeed vast, and he suspected it had been very impressive once, but now it was cracked and filled with small piles of debris and rubbish from previous squatters. Their bounty was sat on a fallen durasteel pipe in front of a small fire, sipping from a cup and apparently completely oblivious to their presence.

Din checked for any sort of weapon and spotted an old and battered blaster, but thankfully no sign of any saber or saber-like weapon. Nevertheless, he stopped a safe distance away and with a quick sign conversation, Cara began to inch sideways to flank him, keeping to the shadows and out of sight, Riye tucked away and hidden behind one of the fallen girders.

He didn’t know if Riye was still caught up in his reaction to the building or if he was picking up on Din’s thoughts because he was being very co-operative and quiet. Normally he would leave Riye with someone to watch him whilst he went on hunts but if this was a Jedi Temple then perhaps it was best that he was with them.

“Hands up,” he ordered, raising his blaster to cover the man on the floor.

He jumped, spilling his drink, and the cup clattered to the floor. As he turned, Din got enough of a look to confirm that he matched the hologram on the puck, proving that he was indeed Marcus Voll, wanted for smuggling, people trafficking, and extortion by the New Republic.

Voll stood, his hands held away from his side and turned fully. “A Mandalorian?” he asked, sounding surprised. “I didn’t think I was worth that much.”

Now he sounded smug, basking in his own dubious fame. Din didn’t like it. Smug ones could go either way, either they came quietly and enjoyed the brief prestige, or they fought like a bantha. The hand not holding his blaster hovered between his saber and the cuffs.

“Does it really matter who brings you in?” he asked, trying to keep him talking so he could get a better judgement on his character.

Voll laughed, almost hysterical. “Not really, Mando, not really. I knew it’d catch up to me eventually.”

Din finally settled on the cuffs and inched closer, hoping for an easy resolution to their standoff. Besides, judging by his focus, Voll hadn’t spotted Cara behind him. 

“Hands out.”

For a moment, Voll shifted to bring his hands out to the front, and Din stepped closer, almost within reach, when Voll paused and stepped back.

“No, I don’t think I will.”

Before Din could react, a saber appeared in Voll’s hand from somewhere and ignited, illuminating the room with a pale blue.

Fuck.

He dropped the blaster to the floor, knowing that if Voll was trained in the Force then it would be practically useless, and grabbed his own saber, igniting it just in time to block the incoming strike. He shoved backwards with enough force to make Voll stumble and took a little comfort in the shock on Voll’s face.

“What the?” Voll stuttered.

Din didn’t give him a chance to finish, he attacked and forced Voll to go on the defensive. It took him three saber clashes to realise that Voll either wasn’t Force sensitive or trained at all, or he had very little training. His handling was clumsy, and his attacks wild, as though he wasn’t used to fighting with a sword. It was possible, he thought, that Voll had just found the saber lying around in the abandoned temple and had claimed it for his own.

Din pressed his advantage, backing Voll into a corner, letting Cara flank again, just in case, but a few strikes later, he broke through the man’s guard and flicked the saber safely away towards the far wall.

Now defenceless, but desperate, Voll grabbed a knife from a hidden sheath, but Din’s saber cut the metal neatly in two before it could do any damage.

Out of options, Voll finally surrendered, lifting his hands up.

“Cover him,” he spat and watched as Voll’s eyes shifted over his shoulder and spotted Cara. With any final chance of escape cut off, he slumped against the wall and bowed his head. Din deactivated his saber and switched it out for the cuffs. “Hands out.”

This time, the cuffs went on without any issue.

Din handed him off to Cara and went over to turn off the other saber, just in case. After a moment he tucked it into his bag for Marin to look over the next time they visited, perhaps someone at her school could use it, and then collected his blaster.

“Riye?” he called, heading over to the girder Cara had left his son behind.

Riye wasn’t there.

Immediately his heartrate picked up and his body tensed with a new adrenaline rush, he began to look around, growing increasingly frantic.

“Din? What’s wrong?”

He ignored Cara’s call, all of his attention focussed on finding his son. “Riye?” he called again, louder, switching over to a thermal scan. “ _Ad'ika_?”

A small noise, over by the back wall. Din followed it and almost sagged in relief when he spotted a small figure in the thermal scan that resembled his son. He began to jog over, shaking a little from the sudden adrenaline rush and come down.

“ _Buir_?” Riye asked, clearly having spotted him.

“Don’t run off like that, Riye,” he chided, struggling to keep the emotions building in his throat out of his voice.

As he got closer he noticed that Riye had found a door, currently blocked in by some of the fallen debris. Now that he was in sight, Riye turned back to the wall, made a small chirping sound, and then closed his eyes and raised a hand in a now familiar pose.

The girders and wires blocking the door began to move and dislodge and for a moment Din could only watch in awe of what his son was capable of.

Then the walls and ceiling creaked and groaned and Din looked up and felt the panic come rushing back. Whatever it was that Riye was moving, it had been holding up part of the roof and now that the support was gone he could see it crumbling and beginning to fall. Right on top of Riye.

“Riye, no!” he shouted, already moving again, running.

Riye stopped at his shout, hand falling, but the damage was done, the roof was coming down and he doubted that Riye could stop it.

His run became a sprint, the shadow of falling steel on the wall showing how little time he had. He was too far away. He wasn’t going to make it. He _had_ to make it. He gave it everything he had, and then some more. His world narrowed down to Riye, in harm’s way, and the path to him.

There was shout, Cara’s voice, a small warmth in his arms, the defending sound of debris crashing to the floor, a weight hitting him, and then nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is that a cliffhanger? Whoops.
> 
> Also, this fic seems to have grown an extra chapter more than I intended, whoops again.


	10. II. The Archive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Din finally gets some answers, has to give some answers, and all the time, danger approaches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're nearing the end, only two chapters to go and so much still to come!  
> Brace yourselves, it's going to be a bumpy ride. Both fluff and angst ahead!  
> (just a warning, this chapter deals with Order 66 at the Jedi Temple)  
> My apologies for the cliffhanger.

“Din?”

The voice sounded very far away, as though the person calling for him was down a long, long tunnel.

“Din!”

It also sounded urgent. So despite his desire to stay where he was in this nice, calm, dark place, he forced himself back into awareness.

“Din, can you hear me?”

It was Cara’s voice. Closer now, louder.

He opened his eyes.

He was lying on the floor, surrounded by rubble. Beneath him, protected by the armoured cocoon he had formed over him, Riye was awake and wriggling.

“ _Buir_?” a much smaller voice asked.

“I’m here,” he said. Then, louder, “I’m here Cara. We’re fine.”

“Thank fuck for that,” she said. “You moved _real_ fast Djarin. Like, unnaturally fast. I was worried you’d hurt yourself.”

Slowly, he unfolded himself, finding a few new bruises here and there but, considering that most of the roof had just come down, they were miraculously unharmed. The small circle of floor around them was mostly clear of debris. Although, he mused, his son might have had something to do with that.

Pushing himself upright, he scooped up Riye, who was clinging tight in the wake of the shock, and looked around for his hunting partner.

Cara was a few metres away, by the doorway that Riye had been trying to open, picking her way unsteadily through the rubble towards them. She reached out to steady herself on bits of durasteel and pipe.

“What about Voll?” he asked, spotting that their quarry wasn’t with her.

Cara made a gesture that communicated just how dead the bounty was. Apparently, he’d not been as lucky when the roof came down. Then, Cara stepped into the light and all thoughts of the bounty went out of his head.

There was blood running down one side of her face.

“Cara,” he said, stoked back into action by the sight, “you’re bleeding.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said in reply, words only slightly slurred now that he was listening for it. “I got caught by the edge of something as it came down. Think I might have a concussion.”

She stumbled to a halt in front of him and he could see the way her pupils contracted at the light, over sensitive most likely.

Nonetheless, he reached out and tilted her head so that he could take a look. He knew that head wounds tended to bleed more than others, so it probably looked worse than it was. The cut, when he found it, was pretty small and already starting to clot. They didn’t have much on them, but he gave it a quick spray with bacta just in case.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“A little fuzzy,” Cara admitted. “Ears are ringing a bit.”

He hummed as he brushed her hair back into place. “Not suddenly forgotten a bunch of words?”

“Ha ha,” Cara said dryly. Then she batted his hand away and planted her hands on her hips. The effect was moderately off-put by the way she swayed a little. “So, when were you going to tell me that you have a lightsaber?”

Din felt a blush rising and he shuffled a little on his feet as he tried to come up with an acceptable answer because the truth was that he’d forgotten, forgotten that she didn’t know. He’d become so used to having the saber, it was a part of his standard gear now.

“It, um, it never came up,” he finally mumbled, knowing that it was totally inadequate. “Sorry.”

Cara hummed, frowning at him. “And how long have you had it?”

“Over a year,” he admitted and braced himself.

“A year?” Cara blurted. “You’ve had one of the best weapons in the galaxy in your possession, and you can use it, for over a year and you didn’t think to tell me?”

His first instinct was to tell her that he had other things on his mind, like the ever-present threat of the Imps, but he knew the real reason and he’d established a policy of being honest with Cara.

“I didn’t think,” he finally said. “I’m not used to having people to share news with.”

In light of that revelation Cara softened a little.

“Not even people from your covert?” she asked gently.

He shrugged. He’d always been a bit of a loner, the quiet one. He connected with the Armourer well enough, and a couple of others in the covert but, after the loss of his parents, he’d never really grown too close to people. It’s what made him well suited to taking on the role of the _beroya_ and provide for the covert, and once he’d started doing that regularly it had made sense not to get too attached, just in case.

That was before Riye had landed in his life and changed everything. Now he had more friends, allies, and acquaintances than he really knew what to do with.

His silence was answer enough for Cara and she finally dropped her hands.

“Hopeless. What are going to do with you, huh?” she asked with a wry smile.

“Teach me,” he said, words bursting out before he had a chance to think them through. He wanted to take them back immediately, embarrassed, but then Cara’s smile grew and reflected in her eyes.

“Well, I can try,” she said, giving him a friendly punch to the shoulder and he rocked back with it, playing along. “So, what was it that the little bean was trying to do before the ceiling dropped on us?”

Din looked over at the door. “He was trying to get into that room.”

Cara followed his gaze. “Looks like it might open now that the rubble is out of the way. You wanna give it a quick search?”

Din shrugged. They had a little time and Riye had been pretty determined. “Alright.”

Slowly they picked their way over to the door. The mechanism was clear and the door had actually already partially opened, enough to give a glimpse into the room beyond.

Din took a quick look and froze.

Then he handed Riye off to Cara and grabbed hold of the edge of the door and began to pull.

“Din, what is it?”

“Archive,” he bit out between heaves. He’d seen enough data stacks and digital libraries in his life to recognise one.

Cara’s eyes widened. She put Riye down, with a stern word not to wander off, grabbed hold next to him, and began to pull.

The door resisted them, creaking and groaned as the grooves into which it slid protested, but inch by inch it moved. Within a minute they had created a gap wide enough for a person to squeeze through. As he held the door open, Cara scrambled for a pipe or girder the right size to slot into the space.

Riye helped to look, or at least, he ran around behind Cara excitedly whilst Din sweated and his muscles shook.

“Got one!”

The pipe fit neatly between the doors and Din slowly relaxed his hold. The pipe caught and, after settling with a squeak, held.

They stood together and looked into the room beyond.

“That’s one hell of an archive,” Cara said eventually just to fill the silence.

The room beyond was vast and mostly intact. Data stacks filled the walls, terminals lay in wait for their next user and Din was pretty sure he could see actual flimsy books at the back.

Between them Riye chirped and pointed. “Jedi!” he exclaimed as Din scooped him up and held him close.

“Yeah,” he said, voice hoarse with wonder, “Jedi. You found them again _ad'ika_.”

He looked over to Cara and she swept out a hand. “After you.”

Din took one last moment to attempt to take it in, then, with a steadying breath, he stepped through the door.

It was a shame that they were on a time limit, because there was probably more useful information in this room than they had time to read and scavenge.

Din was strolling through the stacks, letting Riye guide him for the most part, stopping at anything that looked vaguely useful like training manuals or history books and, if the files were intact, uploading them to the datapad he’d brought with him.

They were only a few aisles in and the memory was already half full.

He had just reached the end of the row when Riye let out a happy shriek and flailed in the direction of one of the nearby shelves.

“You want to go and see that, Riye?” he asked.

“Yes! Yes, _buir_!” Riye replied, utilising one of the newer words in his vocabulary with enthusiasm.

“What do we say?” he continued, with the patience of a single father of a demanding toddler who didn’t like being told no.

“Pwease! Pwease, _buir_! Yes!”

He suspected she would deny it, but he was pretty sure he heard Cara sigh a quiet ‘aww’ behind them.

He had left her to go through one of the working terminals, as it was pretty clear that her balance wasn’t the best and at least there she could sit down.

As they reached the shelf, Riye stretched out to touch the small cube that had caught his eye.

Din picked it up from the shelf and examined it. “What’s this then?” he asked. He wondered if it was a box that could be opened and as he thought about ways to potentially open it, it suddenly lit up in his hand.

Startled, he put it back on the shelf and backed away.

In his experience, when things lit up unexpectedly they usually exploded soon after. He turned, ready to protect Riye and run, but nothing happened.

The cube continued to softly glow and then a hologram flickered to life in front of it.

He was ashamed to admit that he jumped.

“I am Depa Billaba,” the hologram said with a soft smile. “How can I help you, young padawan?”

Din wasn’t sure if the hologram was addressing him or Riye, he wasn’t familiar with the term ‘padawan’. For a moment they watched the hologram, bathed in the blue light, then Riye made a small noise and proudly said one of his new favourite words.

“Jedi!”

The hologram flickered. “The Jedi Order was founded long ago to promote peace and justice throughout the galaxy,” the voice of Depa Billaba recited. “Known for their sensitivity to the Force, the Jedi can be found throughout the known systems carrying out missions. The headquarters of the Order are currently located at the temple of Coruscant.”

Din blinked at the deluge of information. It seemed almost as though the hologram was a digital librarian of sorts. It felt a little silly, asking a hologram questions, but perhaps it was worth a try.

“What’s a padawan?” he asked.

“A padawan,” the hologram replied after a pause, “is a member of the Jedi Order who is training to become a Knight and who has been selected by a Jedi Knight to continue their training under them as their apprentice. Typically, a youngling will be selected by a Jedi Knight for training before their thirteenth birthday, or the equivalent for their species.”

Riye chirped from his arms. “Pad’wan,” he said and grinned.

Din found himself smiling back. Riye had started repeating words, or at least trying to repeat them a lot recently and it was, in his opinion, adorable. It also left him with even more questions about his son’s species and their standard rate of development.

Thinking about it, they should probably stop swearing so much around him before he started repeating that as well.

Turning his attention back to the hologram, he decided that it would be a very useful thing to hold on to. Tentatively, he reached up and took it down from the shelf.

“How do you turn this off?” he asked, examining it but finding no clear switches. In response, the hologram flicked out. “Oh,” he said, feeling slightly stupid.

Carefully, he slipped the cube into his pocket and looked around.

What had happened here that all the people these records talked about were gone and the building crumbling to dust?

“Din,” Cara said from across the room. She sounded hesitant. “I think you need to see this.”

He made his way over. There was a video playing on her terminal and she was watching it uneasily. Din caught a glimpse and hurriedly turned Riye’s head into his shoulder so that he wouldn’t see.

“Cara,” he started, stopped. There were no words.

“I know,” she said.

Together they watched in stunned and horrified silence as the tall hooded figure in dark robes, flanked by the familiar armour of clone soldiers, cut its way through Jedi after Jedi, Din recognised them by their robes which were the same as the woman in the hologram, with sweeping waves of a blue lightsaber.

Din had wondered what had happened here. Now, faced with the answer, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to know.

The figure was crossing a large hall, cutting down side corridors, killing indiscriminately. They navigated the space as though they knew it.

Finally, they entered a room, weapon shutting off.

On the screen, Din could only watch in despair as children began to peek out from behind chairs where they had hidden. One stepped forward and he realised that the boy had recognised the figure.

For a moment, one short moment, he hoped that he had been wrong.

The audio file had degraded so that they couldn’t actually make out what was being said, but some poor soul had taken the time to add a text transcript of the boy’s words.

_Master Skywalker._

_There are too many of them!_

_What are we going to do?_

Din’s heart was in his throat as the figure, Skywalker, paused.

Then the blade ignited and Skywalker stepped forward and he couldn’t watch it anymore, couldn’t bear it. He turned away with a choked noise that he couldn’t identify and behind him he heard a similar sound of disgust and horror from Cara as she, too, turned away and switched the screen off with a touch more violence than necessary.

For a few seconds they just stood there, composing themselves. He took a deep breath and tried to blink away the tears that had formed in his eyes.

“Fuck,” Cara said forcefully.

He agreed wholeheartedly.

Riye squirmed in his arms, clearly sensing that something was wrong and Din held him closer, tipping his head so that the helmet rested against his son and rocked him back and forth a little to sooth them both.

So now they knew.

The great Jedi Order had fallen to a traitor. One of its own had turned against it, become _darjetii_ , sith, and had helped the Empire slaughter them all.

“Children,” Cara said, still in shock, “fucking children.”

“I know,” he said, his own voice sounding choked.

It went against everything in him, everything it meant to be Mandalorian, where children were precious, so precious, and every Mandalorian child and foundling was valued and cared for.

A Mandalorian would never hurt a child.

Cara’s hand on his shoulder drew him back around and into her embrace. She sniffed, clearly shaken. “I’m sorry Din, I didn’t think, didn’t know it would - fuck.”

He didn’t say that it was ok, because it wasn’t. They had just been rather forcefully reminded that they were surrounded by ghosts.

“I know,” he said again, for other words failed him. With another trembling breath, he pulled away from her.

“Do you want to keep looking?” she asked.

He considered it for a moment. They still had a little time before they really needed to move to prevent anyone tracking them here and they’d barely made a dent.

“Yeah,” he said, “if there’s a chance that there’s something here on his species then it’s worth checking.”

“We don’t even know what his species is called,” Cara responded sharply, perhaps wishing to prevent him from getting his hopes up.

Sudden inspiration struck him and he spun around. “Try searching for Yoda.”

“Yoda?” Cara asked. He nodded as she turned the terminal back on and navigated to the search function. He spelt the name out for her when she asked and they held their breath as the terminal crunched the data.

Then files began to appear, one by one, and then in a rush. Hundreds of records all tagged under the search term of Yoda’s name.

Cara tapped on the first one to bring it up.

It was a personnel file, for one Grandmaster Yoda, Head of the Jedi Order, but what caught Din’s eye was the holo attached to the file.

Yoda looked like Riye, an older, more wrinkled Riye, but undoubtedly of the same species.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Cara murmured. “Din, this, this is -”

“Its answers,” he finished, something joyous rising in him. “After all this time, we’ve finally found some answers.”

The moment of elation, at least for Din, was abruptly cut off.

He didn’t know exactly what it was, a sound or a sense, or years of instinct coming through, but he suddenly realised that something was wrong.

“Cara,” he said, voice low. “We’re not alone.”

Her hand dropped straight to her blaster, not for a moment questioning his statement.

“Where?”

“I don’t know, but there’s someone else here, in the building.”

He hesitated, torn between the urge to move and the treasure trove of information that they had just uncovered.

“Din?”

He made a split-second decision and held out his datapad. “Download what you can, I’ll cover you.”

Cara placed her blaster on the edge of the terminal and grabbed the datapad, finger flying across the screen as she transferred whatever she could from the archive on Yoda whilst Din scanned the room, blaster at the ready.

The ominous feeling that they were being watched continued to intensify, as though someone or something was closing in on them until Din couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Cara?”

“I’ve got the biggest files,” she confirmed.

“It’ll have to do.”

“Got it.” Cara grabbed her blaster and stood and, as quickly and quietly as they could, they moved rapidly towards the door. Din ran a scan of the room beyond and felt his stomach drop. There were heat signatures, several of them, heading towards them wearing horribly familiar armour.

“Shit,” he said.

“How many?” Cara asked beside him.

“At least eight, all Imps.”

He felt her tense up as the implication sunk in. “You think it’s Gideon?”

“It has to be,” he said. “Greef said there was an Imp presence here. One of them must have spotted us and alerted them early.”

Cara cursed again. “Did you see any other exits?”

“No,” he replied, watching as the figures on the scan continued their sweep, moving ever closer. Soon they would have to move, or risk being spotted and losing any advantage they might have.

He handed Riye to Cara and pulled out the sling, slipping it on in a practiced movement and twisting out round to his back. He felt Cara’s blaster resting against the side of his pauldron as she tucked his son into the swaddle.

“Be good for your daddy, little one,” she murmured as she stepped back, then to him, “Are we going to have to shoot our way out?”

“Looking like it,” he said, checking over his own blaster and then pulling out his saber with his other hand. He was taking no chances. “Can you watch my back?”

The unspoken question, if she would keep Riye safe and protect him where beskar could not didn’t need to be said out loud. They slipped back into a pattern of movement together as though they’d never been apart, two warriors so completely in tune with each other that they didn’t need words. That didn’t need it wasn’t worth saying them regardless.

“Always,” Cara said, and he stepped through the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mando'a translations:  
> beroya - bounty hunter


	11. II. The Force

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything changes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, this is it.  
> This is the big one.  
> And it's a day early because I'm working from home and easily distracted.  
> Enjoy!

Later, the stories would tell of how an unnamed Mandalorian warrior killed an entire trooper battalion with only his blaster, how he cut his way through to Moff Gideon fuelled by anger and determination to deliver justice for all of those who had suffered under Imperial rule.

The songs sung to foundlings amongst the Mandalorians would tell of Din Djarin, the head of Clan Djarin, using his training from the fighting corps and bounty hunting experience to navigate the maze of the ruined Jedi Temple, eliminating the Imps that got too close to protect his foundling and an injured friend. The songs related his triumph over Moff Gideon in battle, avenging the Mandalorians lost to the night of a thousand tears.

Amongst the fledging Jedi schools that were built after the destruction of the First Order, there were whispers of a Mandalorian who wielded a lightsaber and used it to defend the Jedi Temple from Imperial soldiers and their commander.

Whilst all of these stories were, in some ways, based on reality, none of them were correct in the details.

Instead, it went something like this:

With one goal in mind, escape, Din and Cara broke cover and stepped into the wide and mostly open space of one of the temple’s ruined atriums and were almost immediately overwhelmed.

The first eight troopers fell quickly, but they were not alone.

Although Din’s scans had given him some idea of what to expect, in spite of the number of enemies they were shooting down, there were far more troopers now converging on them than he was comfortable taking without backup. They were drawn by the sound of the firefight, blocking off exits at an alarming rate, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that he knew just who had sent them.

Against his back, he felt Cara stumble as yet another bolt pinged off the beskar and knocked him back a step with the force of it.

“Are you good?” he asked.

“Not really,” Cara replied, sounding out of breath. “I think I really have got a concussion. I can’t see straight enough to shoot properly.”

That was, well, their situation was already not good, but Cara’s deteriorating condition certainly wasn’t going to help.

Din, avoiding another bolt with a twist, reached back to push Cara behind the crumbling pillar they had ended up beside, it looked like it might still provide reasonable cover and, after shooting another trooper, joined her. With the brief reprieve he assessed the situation.

It wasn’t looking hopeful for their continued survival.

Then, just as he was about to suggest a retreat to the archive room his visor drew his attention to a new arrival and he felt dread settle in his stomach like lead. He hated it when he was right.

From the doorway where they had originally entered, Moff Gideon stepped into the room, black armour shining when it caught the dim light.

“Shit,” he cursed.

“Din?” Cara asked.

“It’s Gideon.”

“Fuck.”

Cara was dabbing at her head wound, but the bleeding had apparently stopped and it was pretty clear that she was wavering, her balance unsteady. Din glanced back at the entrance to the archive. The door was still cracked open and his scans showed that none of the troopers were entering from that side of the temple. There was a chance there was a safe way out, but it would be impossible with this many troopers on their tail.

An idea formed in his head. It was a terrible idea, but it was better than having to see a friend die and it might be the only way to get them all out alive. Or any of them.

“Cara,” he said, rummaging through his pockets and shoving a tracker into her hand. He’d liberated it from a hunter and found it was for Riye and he’d kept hold of it, just in case. “I need you to run back to the archive, find a way out and call for help.”

“What?” she asked, injury forgotten in her suddenly fury.

“The covert’s comm data is on the Crest,” he continued, ignoring her anger at being so obviously side-lined. “Look, Cara, we both know we’re not going to win this, but if you get out and get back up then we at least have a chance of surviving.”

Cara still didn’t look pleased. “What about you? You can’t hold them off alone!”

Din checked behind them and found that the troopers were slowly but steadily advancing. They didn’t have much more time.

“I won’t need to, I’m going to surrender.”

“No,” Cara protested immediately, “they’ll just kill you.”

“Not if I have what Gideon wants more than anything else,” he said and judging by the way Cara looked over his shoulder at Riye and the way she deflated, he didn’t need to elaborate.

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“You have to,” he said, bordering on pleading. A blaster bolt burned a hole into the wall next to him. Their time was up. “Please,” he said, “go. I’ll cover you.”

Cara swallowed, tightened her grip on her gun and sent him a piercing glare. “Don’t you dare die on me Din Djarin.”

“I don’t intend to,” he said. “Run!”

Cara ran and he pivoted out from behind the pillar and began shooting at every Imp he could see, drawing their fire towards his well-armoured form. Once he was certain that Cara had been given sufficient time to reach the archive, he fell back behind cover and quickly checked that she had made it.

The scan showed her figure running through the archive and it looked as though no troopers were giving chase. He let himself have one moment of relief. Then, he threw aside his blaster and prepared for the harder, risker part of his hare-brained plan.

Stepping out again, he held his hands up, hoping that any shots would hit beskar.

“Gideon, I surrender,” he called. The shots paused but they didn’t stop and one caught the gap between beskar and it burned as it skimmed past his skin. With a flinch and a hiss of pain he raised his hands higher and stepped forward.

Gideon was watching with disinterest, making it apparent that the normal rules of combat didn’t apply to him. “I surrender!” he repeated and then he played his hand and hoped it would be enough to save them. “I have the Asset!”

Across the room he saw Gideon straighten as the words reached him and, a moment later, Gideon’s voice rang across the room.

“Cease fire!”

A few rouge shots made it through before the order made it across the room and in the sudden silence the ping of the final bolt deflecting from the beskar was frightening loud.

Gideon stepped forward.

“Prove it, Djarin.”

Moving slowly, telegraphing his movements in case any of the troopers were particularly trigger happy, he carefully pulled his cloak aside and turned just enough that the green of Riye’s ears was visible.

Gideon slowly broke into a smile, a twisted and manic thing.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

Hands coming to rest in his hips Gideon nodded. “Perfectly. Although, if I remember correctly, surrender isn’t really the Mandalorian style.”

Din, more practiced now, older, more mature, and plenty practiced in ignoring Paz, shook off the taunt.

“Times change.”

“Indeed they do,” Gideon agreed. After a moment he indicated that Din should approach. “Slowly, mind.”

With careful steps, Din drew closer to the man he hated more than anyone or anything else in the galaxy and he did so basically helpless. Expecting them some unpleasantness was about to happen he did his best to project calm towards Riye, aware of his son’s presence resting at the edge of his mind growing restless and anxious.

It’ll be alright, he tried to say, I won’t leave you.

When they were only a few minutes away Gideon gestured for him to stop and he heard the sound of troopers moving closer until he could see them flanking him in his periphery.

For a moment they just observed each other, the tension building with each passing second.

“It is very rare that I am bested twice by the same person,” Gideon finally said. “I won’t make the same mistake a third time.”

He indicated at the troopers and that was the only warning Din got before the butt of a rifle met the edge of his helmet. Although the beskar absorbed some of the blow his head still snapped to the side and the force of it made his vision swim and his ears ring.

Dazed as he was, they were able to get the cuffs on without a fight.

Gideon looked him up and down and then turned his back, walking around the room towards one of the other functioning doors.

“Bring them.”

He felt Riye being lifted out of the sling and his whole body tensed. In response, Riye began to fuss, squealing in distress.

Closing his eyes against the sound, Din forced himself to relax and, with all the mental strength that Marin had trained into him he projected thoughts at Riye.

Please calm down, he pleaded in the privacy of their minds, please be quiet. I’m still here.

With a sniffle, he heard Riye settled again, now held in the grip of a trooper. It tugged at Din’s very being to see his son back in the hands of the enemy, but right now they didn’t really have a choice. They just had to hope that Cara got back from making her call for help in time.

With a shove against his shoulder, they began to move.

They travelled through the remains of temple in an awkward convoy. Frequently they were forced to navigate spaces in single file, ducking beneath fallen walls and through broken doorways and always the threat of a short-range blaster bolt to his back kept Din moving.

Finally, they entered a room that looked relatively intact, the space opened out and Din took a deep breath simply because he felt like he finally could.

A quick glance around provided him with all the tactical information that he might need.

The room was circular, there were the remains of chairs arranged near the edge of the room in a large semi-circle and they were up high, much higher than they had been if the view from the cracked windows was anything to go by.

Gideon was standing looking out of one of those windows and beside him stood a man that Din didn’t recognise, but he knew the uniform well enough.

A doctor.

The troopers grabbed hold of him to pull him to a stop and one of them began relieving him of his weapons. He felt them hesitate over the saber hilts but eventually they, somewhat gingerly, pulled them off his belt and lined them up alongside the rest of his gear on a makeshift table.

Once they had taken everything they could find, the trooper holding Riye stepped forward, intending to hand him to the doctor and that was the moment when everything went wrong.

Riye, clearly remembering his last experience with someone dressed like that panicked and lashed out. He flung out a hand and even Din was pushed back by the shockwave that he sent out.

Gideon finally turned and, as he caught himself on the window ledge, glared at the doctor.

“Get the suppressor on!”

Din didn’t like the sound of that one bit and he began to test the hold of the troopers in preparation to fight. In response Gideon pulled out his blaster and pointed it at Riye.

He froze. The threat was obvious and he had no doubt that Moff Gideon would follow through if he caused trouble. He wouldn’t even need to kill Riye to make his point. Din would do anything to avoid causing his son pain.

Nonetheless, he had to listen to Riye’s cries as the doctor managed to get a hold of him and pulled something that looked horrifyingly like a collar from his bag.

Feeling his blood grow hot with rage, Din watched as the doctor fumbled with the collar. Then the clasp snapped closed and he almost stumbled as Riy’e presence on the edge of his mind abruptly vanished.

If it were not for the fact that he could see that Riye was fine, if upset, he might have thought his son was dead and then nothing would have stood in his way.

“Better,” Gideon said, relaxing his guard and strolling forward to examine the pieces of Din’s equipment that had been laid out on the table for him.

“ _Shabuir_ ,” Din hissed, unable to do anything else and wanting the satisfaction of saying it to Gideon’s face. “ _Hut’uun_.”

Gideon ignored him, instead picking up the saber he had liberated from Voll and examining it. “I notice that my darksaber isn’t here,” he finally said. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share where you’re keeping it?”

Din kept his silence, practically vibrating with anger and pent up energy as Gideon laid Voll’s saber on the table and picked up the one he had made.

“I wonder who you killed to get this,” he said. “The craftsmanship is rather good. Although, as I recall, you weren’t particularly skilled at using it.”

Behind him, one of the troopers sniggered.

Give me a chance, Din thought, and I’ll show you just how skilled I am.

With surprising reverence, Gideon laid the saber back down and swept his gaze over the rest of his weapons, but nothing else seemed to take his fancy and he stepped back with a sigh.

“Last chance to tell me where the darksaber is and prove your usefulness,” he offered.

Din said nothing. He wouldn’t betray the covert. He’d rather die.

Gideon tipped his head as he looked at him and Din felt himself straightening in response, making it clear that he wouldn’t back down.

“Very well,” Gideon said after a pause. “I will have to pursue other avenues of information, to rest assured, I will get the darksaber back.” His voice hardened. “As it is, you are of no further use to me.” Then, to the troopers restraining him. “Take him outside, remove his helmet, and kill him.”

Din felt cold sweat break out along the back of his neck.

It was the ultimate dishonour. Gideon had to know what it meant to remove a Mandarlorian’s helmet, the malicious delight in his eyes proved it.

Then the two troopers began to pull him back and all he could see was Riye watching him with wide, panicked eyes from the arms of the doctor, could see his son becoming more and more upset as his own struggles flared up and grew increasingly desperate. Cara wasn’t going to make it.

This couldn’t be it. He wouldn’t let it end this way.

He wouldn’t give Moff Gideon the satisfaction.

Seeing the resistance that he was putting up, another trooper grabbed hold of him and pulled and against their combined strength he began to lose the fight.

In the corner the Riye released a desperate cry, clawed hands reaching out for him. The sound distracted all those around him, including Gideon. Perhaps they were concerned about the suppressors not being enough to hold back his son when he was frantic and determined.

They were almost at the door.

His foot slipped, almost sending the whole group tumbling and he felt it.

It settled over him like a strange sense of calm, of peace, and this time, he recognized it. He’d spent so long denying it, dismissing it, but now it reached for him and he reached back, grasped, focused.

On the table, unnoticed in the commotion, his saber twitched, but he saw it. Could it be true?

It wasn’t enough. It had to be enough. It was impossible.

_“There is a gift in you, Din.”_

Marin’s words rang in his ears. He sucked in a breath, closed his eyes, and stretched out a flailing hand towards the weapon that had saved them time and time again.

He had nothing left. He was desperate.

He hoped. He believed.

And suddenly it was enough.

Faster than anyone could react, the saber sailed through the air, straight into his welcoming grasp.

For a moment he stood in shock. It had worked, it had actually worked. The implications of that were troubling, but he shoved those thoughts away.

He could deal with what this meant later, when his son was safe.

Before anyone could move, he ignited the blade, angling the hilt to ensure at least one of the men trying to separate him from his son met an abrupt and messy end.

As their brains caught up with their eyes and ears, the other troopers released him, stumbling backwards, not even bothering to reach for their weapons in the face of the saber and the way he had claimed it.

Moff Gideon stared, eyes fixed on the golden blade. “Impossible.”

Din twirled the saber, just to prove how very possible it was, letting the blade singe a line in the concrete floor and settled into a ready stance, still feeling that almost unnatural calm.

He felt as though he could already see how this would span out, the moves and countermoves that would ensure his victory.

“Give me my son.”

The doctor flinched back at his voice and even Gideon twitched now that he was faced with the saber and he no longer had the darksaber to defend himself with. Voll’s lightsaber was on the table, out of immediate reach and Din knew that Gideon was trying to work out if he could reach it before Din reached him.

He couldn’t and they both knew it.

“What a surprise, to find a force sensitive Mandalorian.” Gideon spoke, hand resting near his blaster, but not reaching, not yet. “I wonder what your fellow Mandalorians would think if they could see you now, a consort of the power of their enemy.”

Gideon was quick, Din would give him that, but now, with the Force flowing through him, he was quicker.

Almost without conscious effort, he moved faster than thought, still caught in that trance, that peace. The blaster bolt caught the caught the edge of the blade and bounced harmlessly away behind him. He could hear troopers frantically jumping out of the way and he was fairly sure one of them was praying.

In the light of his supernatural speed the room froze again and this time even Moff Gideon hesitated, caught off-guard. It was clear he had not anticipated that Din would be able to deflect the blaster bolt, had thought he still had a way out.

Now he knew what it felt like to be defenceless. Now he knew how the innocent foundlings on Mandalore had felt before the E-Web had opened fire and slaughtered them.

“What are you? Jedi?” Gideon hissed, fear in his eyes as he backed up towards the wall, fully on the defensive.

“I am no Jedi, Gideon,” Din replied. In truth, he didn’t know what he was anymore. Everything had changed. There was no going back now. “Last chance, give me Riye and I might let you live.”

“No, you won’t,” Gideon said.

There was desperation in his voice now. He knew that he had once again underestimated his foe. Good. It would be the last time he would have the opportunity.

Din twirled the saber again, enjoying the flinch it got out of the once-proud Imp. A single step forward put him close enough to bare the golden-yellow blade in Moff Gideon’s face.

“You’re right,” he admitted. “I won’t. And you know why? I am Din Djarin, head of Clan Djarin. I am a wielder of the Force,” he said with the sudden certainty that it was true, “and I’m Mandalorian.”

And then, with a smooth and violent swing of the blade, he separated Moff Gideon’s head from his shoulders.

The minutes after the death of Moff Gideon were a blur in Din’s mind.

He didn’t know what had happened to the troopers, whether they had fled and deserted in the wake of the death of their de-facto commander or whether Cara had finished them off all he knew was that by the time awareness of his surroundings had bled back in they were all gone.

His focus had been entirely on Riye.

With trembling fingers he tucked his saber away and picked his son up from the pod they had placed him in and struggled for a moment with the mechanism on the suppressor. Whatever calm that the Force had brought, it fled now.

Finally, the clasp came free and he felt Riye’s presence flood back into his mind, along with an accompanying sense of his own relief that his son hadn’t been permanently harmed by being cut off from the Force.

He gathered Riye up into his arms and held him close, feeling his son hold on just as fiercely, rocking side to side unconsciously as he both gave and sought comfort.

That was how Cara found them, in the centre of an empty room, holding tight to each other in the light of the rising sun.

“Is that Gideon?” Cara exclaimed as she spotted the slumped body and the distinctly no–longer-attached head.

Din didn’t even bother responding out loud. He wasn’t sure he was capable of speech. Untangling one hand from Riye’s clothes, he reached out towards her and pulled her into a close embrace, letting his helmet rest against her hair.

“Din?” she asked into his neck, not confused, not yet, just concerned. “Are you both alright?”

“Yes,” he said, even though he wasn’t, he had so many questions, so much of him still reeling from what had happened and the consequences it might bring.

Everything was different now.

He was different.

Cara murmured his name again and then he felt her arms snake around to hold him in return and they soaked in each other’s warmth against the cold, hard reality of the universe, revelling in this moment of rest and relief.

Gideon was dead. Riye was finally safe.

“It’s over,” he said at last, tasting the salt of his own tears. “It’s finally over.”

**_End of Part 2_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mando'a translations:  
> shabuir - an extreme insult, like 'jerk' but much worse.


	12. III. The Mandalorian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Din comes to terms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it! The series is finished!  
> A massive thank you to everyone who has left kudos, commented, or otherwise let me know that they have been enjoying this little AU. This is for all of you!  
> Take care of yourselves <3

The Razor Crest was oddly quiet.

Riye had been tired out by the ordeal and had quickly settled down to sleep. If it had been under any other circumstances, Din would have been relieved; instead he was struggling to swallow down his worry that his son was hurting in ways he didn’t understand.

Cara had perched herself in the cargo bay and was meticulously cleaning their weapons so Din took the opportunity to retreat to the cockpit and attempt to work through everything that had happened.

The first thing that he was finding it difficult to wrap his head around was the reality that Gideon was very, definitively, dead. He suspected not even the Force could repair the fatal blow he had dealt.

Which also meant that Riye was finally free from pursuit. With Gideon dead, the bounty on Riye had become impossible to fulfil, and the puck that he had kept hold of was registering the bounty as removed as the reward was no longer available.

It was a weight off his shoulders and he hadn’t realised quite how heavy the burden how been, how much it had inhabited every area of his life until it was gone.

It was like part of his personality, his purpose, had been ripped away. He had made the transition from bounty hunter to on-the-run father surprisingly well all things considered but now he wasn’t sure where to turn next.

Of course, there was also the issue of exactly how he had defeated Moff Gideon and that brought its own set of anxieties.

He had been raised with stories of the Mandalorian fight against the _jetii_ and their strange powers. Until Riye, he had associated the Force with the enemy, seen it as something to be avoided where possible and eliminated at all costs, and even after Riye had come into his life it had been a struggle to shrug off his prejudices.

Was that why it had taken so long for the power hidden in him to come to the surface? Had he always had the capability to do this and had he been unconsciously supressing it his whole life?

It was an uncomfortable thought for a variety of reasons.

He glanced over at the saber, where it rested on Riye’s seat and wondered whether he would ever feel comfortable holding it again, knowing what he knew now.

Could he even call himself Mandalorian anymore knowing what he was?

Caught up in his dilemma, he jumped at the rustle behind him, uncomfortably close and turned on instinct, expecting a threat, but it was only Cara, was clambering up into the cockpit, balance still slightly askew and he relaxed again with difficulty.

“Have you updated the covert?” she asked as she settled in the other spare chair, swinging it from side to side.

“Yeah,” he replied, waving vaguely in the direction of the comm.

The Armourer had been relieved to hear from him and had informed him that a group from the covert which had been deployed to help would instead meet him on his route back to the covert and help with any supplies or injuries.

Paz, she warned him, was amongst them. It made sense as he was one of the best warriors in the covert, but that was not a conversation he was looking forward to.

There was also a message from Marin, who had somehow heard, or perhaps sensed, what had happened, checking that they were all safe.

“So,” Cara continued when he failed to elaborate, “is there any particular reason that you’re sat up here in the dark and not resting like a sensible person?”

How could he answer that?

Cara seemed to sense his unrest and leant in, voice softening. “What happened back there, Din?” she asked.

He stared down at his shaking hands and did his best to quell the quivering by clenching them tightly into fists.

“I don’t know,” he said and hated how his voice trembled, small and weak and overwhelmed. “I did things, Cara, like Riye can. Things I can’t explain.”

There was a stunned silence and he suspected that whatever Cara had been expecting him to say, it wasn’t that.

“You mean you used the Force?” she said eventually, tentatively, as though he were fragile.

He was. He felt as though he might shatter if he probed too much into this, but he had to, needed to. There was no escaping it now.

“Yes Cara,” he said, a tad too sharply, “I used the Force. I don’t know how and I don’t know why, or if I’ve been able to do this my whole life and just didn’t know how to use it or if something sparked it and I don’t know what it means, whether I can call myself Mandalorian anymore considering I’ve used the powers of what I thought were enemies, but Riye isn’t like them and I just, don’t know.”

The words tumbled out completely uncontrolled, his frustration bleeding through.

“Alright!” Cara said, reaching for him. “Just calm down, Din. Deep breaths.”

It wasn’t until he tried to take one that he noticed how tense he’d become in his panicking. His pulse was beating in his ears, fast and loud, and his breathing was sharp and shallow enough that black spots had started dancing in the corners of his vision.

He let Cara coax him back into a relatively normal state, no longer afraid to show weakness in front of her.

“There we go,” she said as he settled. “I get why you’re kind of freaking out over it, but maybe don’t get yourself so worked up about it. You can talk to me, ok?”

He nodded, slightly ashamed of his response now that he was thinking rationally again.

“Thanks,” he said quietly.

“No problem, Din,” Cara said, her hand still resting on his shoulder. “I might not be able to answer your questions but I’m happy to listen. As for whether you can call yourself a Mandalorian or not, that’s simple enough to answer. Have you broken your creed?”

The question was so outrageous that he didn’t even think about it.

“What? No, of course not!”

“Then,” she said simply, sitting back as though that resolved everything, “you’re still Mandalorian.”

He went to protest and stopped himself because when he thought about it, she wasn’t actually wrong.

A piece slid back into place.

“I – thank you.”

Cara smiled, sticking her boots up on the console and he couldn’t even bring himself to object.

“Look, Din,” she said after a moment of watching the stars, “I’ve been thinking. Navarro was good but it got boring, and I enjoy your company and I think that right now, you might need a friend so how would you feel if I stayed? At least for the time being.”

He considered how easily Cara had slid into life on the Crest, how quickly she had picked up caring for Riye.

“There’s not much space,” he said finally.

“I’ve dealt with worse,” she replied and although her tone was cheerful he could hear the vulnerability beneath.

Did she really think he would reject her? After all she had done for him, for them?

She was his closest friend.

“Sure,” he said. “As long as you want.” Then, feeling a little sheepish he added, “that’s what friends do, right?”

Cara grinned, sinking back into the chair and nodded.

The rendezvous with the covert ship went about as well as expected. One of the younger members, one that he didn’t know very well, organised the docking procedures but, judging by the noise on the other side of the door, every other Mandalorian on board had come down to join the welcoming committee.

“You ready?” he asked Cara.

She was holding onto their packs whilst he dealt with Riye, who was quickly becoming overexcited and showing no ill effects from his time in Gideon’s grasp.

“Mandalorians don’t scare me,” Cara said with a cheeky grin at him. “I’m ready if you are.”

He gave Riye the mythosaur pendant that he had been reaching for and reached for the door release.

A wall of noise hit them as the squabbling Mandalorians on the other side of the door fidgeted in the confined space which was clearly not designed to be occupied by so many people in full armour.

“ _Al'verde_!” He heard something call. “He’s here!”

At the back of the group, a large figure in painfully familiar armour turned.

“So, Din Djarin,” Paz said, pushing through to the front, “you say that the Imp who attacked the covert is dead?”

“Yes,” he confirmed, straightening. Behind him, he felt Cara do the same and he felt better knowing that she would back him up if needed.

Paz tilted his head in a familiar challenge. “And how can you be so sure of that?”

“Because,” Din started, reigning in his rising temper with effort, “I be-, I beh-, decap-, oh you’ve got to be kriffing kidding me.” It had been months since he’d last encountered a problem word and now he got two and it had to happen in front of Paz Vizla of all people? Breathe, he told himself, compromise, don’t look like any more of an idiot and give him an opportunity. “I cut his head off,” he bit out instead.

There was a moment of quiet as the declaration made its way through the ranks.

“Yep,” the voice of Aikan confirmed with alarming cheer from behind the bulk of Paz. “That would do it.”

Paz, however, hadn’t reacted and Din would swear that he could feel the frown aimed at him.

“Were you trying to say ‘beheaded?’”

Well, he had hoped that he might be able to keep this secret but it looked like Paz was petty enough that he wasn’t going to let the slip pass.

“Yes,” he said simply and hoped that would be it.

“Why didn’t you?”

Din inhaled sharply and decided it was best to just get this out of the way. “Because,” he spat, “I took one too many hits to the head and now my brain doesn’t like certain words.” He let that sink in for a moment and it seemed almost as though Paz shrank back a little, though he couldn’t work out why that had impacted Paz when the news of how Gideon had met his death hadn’t even fazed him. “Satisfied?” he asked.

Silence greeted them and he took the chance to push through the group, Riye held tight in his arms and Cara close on his heels, apparently completely unbothered at being surrounded by a group of heavily armoured warriors whilst still recovering from a head injury herself.

The crowd parted easily to let them through but it wasn’t until they reached their temporary quarters and were finally alone that Din fully relaxed.

After the novelty of having them on board wore off, the rest of the journey to the covert went smoothly. A number of Mandalorians that he hadn’t known particularly well before seemed to want to talk to him plenty now that he had gained a reputation as an Imp killer. Especially that particular Imp.

Aikan pinned him down as soon as she could to give him the full interrogation on his head injury and subsequent vocabulary loss but she quickly established that they had done the best that they could and that it was unlikely that she could do anything more for him.

Perhaps, when he had originally realised that he had lost the ability to say certain words that sort of news would have been devastating, but he’d come to accept that his condition was just one of his quirks so he simply thanked her and escaped before she could start asking him about the other injuries he had sustained since she last saw him.

The Mandalorians had been surprisingly accepting of Cara’s presence. Riye was welcomed into the fold because he was a foundling, but Cara was an outsider and he had expected some of them to resist her coming with them.

No one had. Not even Paz.

It was odd, but he wasn’t going to question it. Over the remaining hours it took them to reach Bakura he spent most of his time keeping an eye on Riye as he went around enjoying the attention. All of the Mandalorians seemed to want to play with him, so it was difficult keeping track of his son’s small form amongst the larger adults.

On the other hand, it did mean that Riye was easy to put to bed again so Din could understand why parents preferred to stay at the covert where others could distract the children and wear them out with games and lessons.

By the time they reached the covert Din was craving the privacy the larger space would offer. It felt as though he hadn’t had a moment’s peace during the journey.

Unusually, the Armourer was waiting for them, already seated on her side of the table.

Din felt the rest of the troop fade away until he alone was walking forwards to join the Armourer. As he approached, he could hear Riye asking for him and Cara’s attempts to hush him, loud in the suddenly quiet room.

He sat opposite the Armourer and waited for her to speak.

“Can you confirm that Moff Gideon is dead?” she asked, the words echoing.

“Yes,” he said.

Again, there was a moment as the news sunk in and then one of the children cheered and soon everyone was joining in and shouts of ‘ _oya_!’ filled the room and lightened the atmosphere.

Eventually the noise quietened down, though not before one of the youngsters shouted one final ‘ _oya_!’ to a round of chuckles from their elders.

“It is good to know that our brothers and sisters have been avenged,” the Armourer said. “We shall celebrate this victory tonight.” A rustle of anticipation went around the room. “Does this also mean that your foundling is safe?”

“Yes,” Din confirmed and felt another ripple go around the room at that. “The bounty has been removed. He will not be hunted anymore.”

“That is also good news,” the Armourer said warmly. Then she addressed the room. “You are dismissed.” As the gathered Mandalorians began to filter out she leant in a little closer. “Do you wish to speak privately?”

He nodded once to confirm and then followed her as she stood and headed for her rooms.

The first thing he noticed upon entering the Armourers’ rooms was that the darksaber was now mounted on the wall, held securely in a bracket that was clearly made of beskar. The second was that there was a few toys scattered around.

“My daughter is not yet old enough to begin training,” she said when she noticed where his attention had drifted.

“Congratulations,” he said. It was unexpected but joyful news.

“Thank you,” the Armourer said as she sat. “Please sit.”

As he sat he felt the weight of his saber digging into his hip and he reached to pull it free from its holster and laid it on the table in front of the Armourer.

She examined it with interest, but didn’t move to touch it.

“This is the weapon that killed Moff Gideon?” she asked.

“It is,” he confirmed.

She nodded, apparently satisfied and sat back to observe him. “Yet, in spite of this good news, you are troubled. Something happened, didn’t it?”

Sometimes he hated how perceptive the Armourer was.

“You know how Riye can use the power of the _jetii_?” he asked. The Armourer tipped her head in confirmation. “Well, apparently, so can I.” He took a fortifying breath. “I was able to call the saber to my hand from across the room and it was as though I could see things happening before they actually did. I blocked a blaster bolt, which would normally be next to impossible but it felt easy. And I don’t know how I did any of this, or if I would be able to do it again if needed.”

With the confession out he waited for the response, but the Armourer didn’t say anything, barely reacted at all and a suspicion began to grow in him.

“You already knew,” he said, eyes widening as it sunk in.

The Armourer uncrossed her arms and slumped back a little into her chair. “Yes, I did.”

“How?” he asked. The Mandalorians they had travelled with didn’t know so they couldn’t have told her and Cara wouldn’t break his confidence like that but there was no one else who knew. It made no sense.

“When I took on the position of the Armourer,” she said slowly, “my _alor_ took me aside and taught me all I would need to know in order to one day lead this covert. He also told me to keep an eye on one of my peers because one day they might come into a power they didn’t even know they had and I had to be prepared to assist them.”

Din shifted uncomfortably as he realised where this was going. “He was talking about me, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. Apparently, when you were first brought into your covert, when you were particularly upset or emotional, you would do things that the _al'verde_ who found you couldn’t explain. He confided in the other _alor_ that he was in contact with, who recognised your abilities as like those of the _jetii_. As you were a foundling, it was decided that such displays would be discouraged, for your own safety, and you would be raised as any other Mandalorian. As I’m sure you are aware, the attitude towards the _jetii_ back then was not particularly pleasant.”

Din swallowed around the information, the sudden shift in his world view and in his memories. He tried, but could not recall ever doing anything like Riye, but the Armourer wouldn’t lie. Not about this.

“So I have always been able to use the Force?”

“Yes,” the Armourer sighed. “You have.” She hesitated and then asked, “are you alright? I understand this is a lot to take in.”

In truth, he was torn between being relieved that they had kept this from him and being angry for precisely the same reason.

At the same time, the revelation that he was like Riye opened up a new realm of possibilities and his path, which had minutes before been so uncertain, was now becoming clear.

This was part of him, it had always been part of him, he just hadn’t known it. Now he did, and he knew what he had to do next.

“It is a lot,” he said, “and I am glad that you have told me, but it’s made it clear that I can’t stay here. Not yet. There’s something I need to do first.”

Across from him, the Armourer took a moment to follow his line of reasoning and then she nodded in understanding and acceptance and together they stood. He clipped his saber back to his belt and conspicuously didn’t ask for the darksaber.

Where usually he felt the authority of the Amourer’s presence, in that moment he felt oddly like an equal.

“Safe travels, _vod_ ,” she said finally in dismissal. “Look after your _aliit_.”

He nodded, taking the instruction to heart, and turned to the door but her voice caught him just before he felt.

“But know this; I would answer your call, Din Djarin, if you were ever to claim the title of _Mand’alor_.”

The words settled on his shoulders as a reassurance and challenge in equal measure.

As he approached the village on Nova, with Riye snug in his arms having been extracted from the Razor Crest and the care of his favourite ex-shock trooper babysitter, he concerned about the reception he would receive after so long away.

That they might see him as a threat, as someone who had taken their knowledge and tools and killed with them, assuming that Marin had spread the news.

It turned out that he didn’t need to worry because Marin was waiting for him by the gate with a smile and an open posture.

“Hello Din,” she greeted.

He stopped a few metres away from her and crossed his arms. “You knew, didn’t you?”

“Knew what?”

“‘A gift in me’, I believe they were your exact words.”

Marin had the decency to at least look chagrined. “Ah.”

“Yes,” he replied and revelled in the uncomfortable pause and she worked out how to navigate the confrontation.

“I knew the moment I saw you,” Marin said, with an awkward smile. “The Force knew you Din, even then. It _danced_ around you, just like it dances around your son, and myself, and every other citizen of this village with even the slightest sensitivity.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“No,” she admitted, “I didn’t. Though not because I didn’t want to tell you. Rather, I wasn’t sure you wanted to hear. At least not then.”

“That’s why I can shield my mind, isn’t it?”

“Partially. I wasn’t lying when I said that anyone can learn the technique, but it is easier and quicker with the Force. When you finally found it in our final session, I knew you were ready.”

“I’ve been using it all along,” Din said, distracted and caught up in the revelation.

“In one way or another, yes, you have,” Marin confirmed. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it? You don’t just want confirmation.”

As always, she was right. Din wondered how much was to do with the Force and how much was her own intuition.

He looked past her into the village, where he could see a few familiar faces amongst the group in the square, practicing their drills with wooden staffs, and to the small gathering in the garden sat in quiet meditation.

It would never be home, this place, but it felt a little like he had been reunited with long-lost family.

He felt Marin’s eyes assessing him, the small uptick of a genuine smile pulling at her mouth. Maybe she could sense his wonder, maybe she could see it in his body language. It didn’t matter. What mattered was what she had offered him, the last time he had been here, and whether that offer still held.

He looked down at Riye, wrapped up in his sling, who was watching the village with wide eyes, hands clutching the spare kyber crystal he had retrieved from the cave and made a potentially life-changing decision.

“I want to learn,” he said. “Will you teach me?”

**_End_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mando'a translations:  
> al'verde - commander  
> aliit - family  
> oya - a trumiphant and positive declaration with many meanings: literally, 'let's hunt!' but also 'stay alive!', 'hoorah!', 'go you!', or 'cheers!'


End file.
